Gaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)

Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.

Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.

Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.

AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List
Game Genre Release Date API IGP Low Med High
Civilization VI RTS Oct
2016
DX12 1080p
Ultra
4K
Ultra
8K
Ultra
16K
Low

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Civilization VI IGP Low Medium High
Average FPS
95th Percentile
Gaming: Shadow of War Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)
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  • snowranger13 - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link

    On the AMD SKUs slide you show Ryzen 7 2700X has 16 PCI-E lanes. It actually has 20 (16 to PCI-E slots + 4 to 1x M.2)
  • Ian Cutress - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link

    Only 16 for graphics use. We've had this discussion many times before. Technically the silicon has 32.
  • Nioktefe - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link

    Many motherboards can use that 4 additionnal lanes as classic pci-e
    https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/B450%20Pro4/index.as...
  • mapesdhs - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link

    Sure, but not for SLI. It's best for clarity's sake to exclude chipset PCIe in the lane count, otherwise we'll have no end of PR spin madness.
  • Ratman6161 - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link

    Ummm...there are lots of uses for more PCIe besides SLI ! Remember that while people do play games on these platforms, it would not make any sense to buy one of these for the purpose of playing games. You buy it for work and if it happens to game OK then great.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link

    Is it guaranteed to be wired up to a physical slot?

    No?

    then it is optional, and advertising it as being guaranteed available for expansion would be false advertising.
  • TechnicallyLogic - Thursday, February 28, 2019 - link

    By that logic, Intel CPUs have no PCIE slots, as there are LGA 1151 Mini STX motherboards with no x16 slot at all. I think a good compromise would be to list the CPU as having 16+4 PCIE slots.
  • Yorgos - Friday, November 2, 2018 - link

    for clarity's sake they should report the 9900k at 250Watt TDP.
    selective clarity is purch media's approach, though.

    2700x has 20 pcie lanes, period. if some motherboard manufacturers use it for nvme or as an extra x4 pcie slot, it's not up to debate for a "journalist" to include it or exclude it, it's fucking there.
    unless the money are good ofc... everyone has their price.
  • TheGiantRat - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link

    Technically the silicon of each die has total of 128 PCI-E lanes. Each die on Ryzen Threadripper and Epyc has 64 lanes for external buses and 64 lanes for IF. Therefore, the total is 128 lanes. They just have it limited to 20 lanes for consumer grade CPUs.
  • atragorn - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link

    Why are the epyc scores so low across the board? I dont expect it to game well but it was at the bottom or close to it for everything it seemed

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