The Intel 6th Gen Skylake Review: Core i7-6700K and i5-6600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTGenerational Tests on the i7-6700K: Gaming Benchmarks on Mid-Range GPUs
Alien: Isolation
If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled.
For low end graphics, we test at 720p with Ultra settings, whereas for mid and high range graphics we bump this up to 1080p, taking the average frame rate as our marker with a scripted version of the built-in benchmark.
Total War: Attila
The Total War franchise moves on to Attila, another The Creative Assembly development, and is a stand-alone strategy title set in 395AD where the main story line lets the gamer take control of the leader of the Huns in order to conquer parts of the world. Graphically the game can render hundreds/thousands of units on screen at once, all with their individual actions and can put some of the big cards to task.
For low end graphics, we test at 720p with performance settings, recording the average frame rate. With mid and high range graphics, we test at 1080p with the quality setting. In both circumstances, unlimited video memory is enabled and the in-game scripted benchmark is used.
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise finally hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark, relying only on the final part which combines a flight scene along with an in-city drive-by followed by a tanker explosion. For low end systems we test at 720p on the lowest settings, whereas mid and high end graphics play at 1080p with very high settings across the board. We record both the average frame rate and the percentage of frames under 60 FPS (16.6ms).
GRID: Autosport
No graphics tests are complete without some input from Codemasters and the EGO engine, which means for this round of testing we point towards GRID: Autosport, the next iteration in the GRID and racing genre. As with our previous racing testing, each update to the engine aims to add in effects, reflections, detail and realism, with Codemasters making ‘authenticity’ a main focal point for this version.
GRID’s benchmark mode is very flexible, and as a result we created a test race using a shortened version of the Red Bull Ring with twelve cars doing two laps. The car is focus starts last and is quite fast, but usually finishes second or third. For low end graphics we test at 1080p medium settings, whereas mid and high end graphics get the full 1080p maximum. Both the average and minimum frame rates are recorded.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
The final title in our testing is another battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Shadow of Mordor. Produced by Monolith using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity to a large extent, despite having to be cut down from the original plans. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
For testing purposes, SoM gives a dynamic screen resolution setting, allowing us to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. As a result, we get several tests using the in-game benchmark. For low end graphics we examine at 720p with low settings, whereas mid and high end graphics get 1080p Ultra. The top graphics test is also redone at 3840x2160, also with Ultra settings, and we also test two cards at 4K where possible.
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SkOrPn - Tuesday, December 13, 2016 - link
Well if you were paying attention to AMD news today, maybe you partially got your answer finally. Jim Keller yet again to the rescue. Ryzen up and take note... AMD is back...CaedenV - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Agreed, seems like the only way to get a real performance boost is to up the core count rather than waiting for dramatically more powerful single-core parts to hit the market.kmmatney - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
If you have an overclocked SandyBridge, it seems like a lot of money to spend (new motherboard and memory) for a 30% gain in speed. I personally like to upgrade my GPU and CPU when I can get close the double the performance of the previous hardware. It's a nice improvement here, but nothing earth=shattering - especially considering you need a new motherboard and memory.Midwayman - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
And right as dx12 is hitting as well. That sandy bridge may live a couple more generations if dx12 lives up to the hype.freaqiedude - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
agreed I really don't see the point of spending money for a 30% speedbump in general, (as its not that much) when the benefit in games is barely a few percent, and my other workloads are fast enough as is.If Intel would release a mainstream hexa/octa core I would be all over that, as the things I do that are heavy are all SIMD and thus fully multithreaded, but I can't justify a new pc for 25% extra performance in some area's. with CPU performance becoming less and less relevant for games that atleast is no reason for me to upgrade...
Xenonite - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
"If Intel would release a mainstream hexa/octa core I would be all over that, as the things I do that are heavy are all SIMD and thus fully multithreaded, but I can't justify a new pc for 25% extra performance in some area's."SIMD actually has absolutely nothing to do with multithreading. SIMD refers to instruction-level parallellism, and all that has to be done to make use of it, for a well-coded app, is to recompile with the appropriate compiler flag. If the apps you are interested in have indeed been SIMD optimised, then the new AVX and AVX2 instructions have the potential to DOUBLE your CPU performance. Even if your application has been carefully designed with multi-threading in mind (which very few developers can, let alone are willing to, do) the move from a quad core to a hexa core CPU will yield a best-case performance increase of less than 50%, which is less than half what AVX and AVX2 brings to the table (with AVX-512 having the potential to again provide double the performance of AVX/AVX2).
Unfortunately it seems that almost all developers simply refuse to support the new AVX instructions, with most apps being compiled for >10 year old SSE or SSE2 processors.
If someone actually tried, these new processors (actually Haswell and Broadwell too) could easily provide double the performance of Sandy Bridge on integer workloads. When compared to the 900-series Nehalem-based CPUs, the increase would be even greater and applicable to all workloads (integer and floating point).
boeush - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
Right, and wrong. SIMD are vector based calculations. Most code and algorithms do not involve vector math (whether FP or integer). So compiling with or without appropriate switches will not make much of a difference for the vast majority of programs. That's not to say that certain specialized scenarios can't benefit - but even then you still run into a SIMD version of Amdahl's Law, with speedup being strictly limited to the fraction of the code (and overall CPU time spent) that is vectorizable in the first place. Ironically, some of the best vectorizable scenarios are also embarrassingly parallel and suitable to offloading on the GPU (e.g. via OpenCL, or via 3D graphics APIs and programmable shaders) - so with that option now widely available, technologically mature, and performant well beyond any CPU's capability, the practical utility of SSE/AVX is diminished even further. Then there is the fact that a compiler is not really intelligent enough to automatically rewrite your code for you to take good advantage of AVX; you'd actually have to code/build against hand-optimized AVX-centric libraries in the first place. And lastly, AVX 512 is available only on Xeons (Knights Landing Phi and Skylake) so no developer targeting the consumer base can take advantage of AVX 512.Gonemad - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I'm running an i7 920 and was asking myself the same thing, since I'm getting near 60-ish FPS on GTA 5 with everything on at 1080p (more like 1920 x 1200), running with a R9 280. It seems the CPU would be holding the GFX card back, but not on GTA 5.Warcraft - who could have guessed - is getting abysmal 30 FPS just standing still in the Garrison. However, system resources shows GFX card is being pushed, while the CPU barely needs to move.
I was thinking perhaps the multicore incompatibility on Warcraft would be an issue, but then again the evidence I have shows otherwise. On the other hand, GTA 5, that was created in the multicore era, runs smoothly.
Either I have an aberrant system, or some i7 920 era benchmarks could help me understand what exactly do I need to upgrade. Even specific Warcraft behaviour on benchmarks could help me, but I couldn't find any good decisive benchmarks on this Blizzard title... not recently.
Samus - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
The problem now with nehalem and the first gen i7 in general isn't the CPU, but the x58 chipset and its outdated PCI express bus and quickpath creating a bottleneck. The triple channel memory controller went mostly unsaturated because of the other chipset bottlenecks which is why it was dropped and (mostly) never reintroduced outside of enthusiast x99 quad channel interface.For certain applications the i7 920 is, amazingly, still competitive today, but gaming is not one of them. An SLI GTX 570 configuration saturates the bus, I found out first hand that is about the most you can get out of the platform.
D. Lister - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
Well said. The i7 9xx series had a good run, but now, as an enthusiast/gamer in '15, you wouldn't want to go any lower than Sandy Bridge.