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Civilization VI, Battlefield 1 & Dawn of War III
Civilization VI AI Test
Quad-core processors tend to provide the best results in Civilization VI's AI test, which measures available computational horsepower during a turn-based strategy gaming session.
The Core i9-7900X puts on an impressive show, though, as it vies for supremacy with Intel's -7700K. The overclocked 1950X in Game Mode provides solid performance, though it drops to the bottom of our chart in its stock configuration. Interestingly, the 1950X using Local/SMT settings yields the best results in an out-of-the-box arrangement, though it drops down the chart after overclocking. This is the only game in which we see this repeatable trend.
Civilization VI Graphics Test
Skylake-X has a tendency to perform poorly in this test, which is likely due to some of the regressions we encountered with Intel’s new mesh architecture. The stock Threadripper processors outperform Intel’s finest. Notably, the overclocked 1950X with Local/SMT settings also beats the Core i9. You can clearly see a few of the -7900X’s hiccups in our frame time chart. All the while, a tuned Core i7-7700K dominates.
Battlefield 1 (DX11)
The stock Threadripper processors stumble during the first seconds of our test sequence, resulting in much of the frame time variance you see in our chart. The tuned 1950X in Game Mode avoids this early choppiness and provides the best overall performance from AMD. It’s notable that the delta between most of the processors is smaller than we see in other titles, though the overclocked Core i9-7900X provides a bit of extra horsepower to distance itself slightly.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III
The eight-core i7-7820X struggles during our benchmark run, though it does beat AMD's stock 1950X in Local/SMT mode. We realize a large improvement from Threadripper simply by toggling into Game Mode. Meanwhile, a decent 3.9 GHz overclock doesn’t provide much extra performance. That stands in contrast to the large overclocking gains extracted from Core i7-7700K and i9-7900X, implying this game might benefit from optimization.
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