AotS: Escalation & Civilization VI
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
Running overclocked in Creator mode narrowly yields the best average frame rate during the Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation benchmark
Game mode reduces the core/thread count and available cache, which unsurprisingly results in low performance during this heavily threaded title. The benchmark does appear to favor physical cores over logical processors, as the Local/SMT Off configuration beats the Local/SMT option with all of the architecture's threads accessible.
Civilization VI AI Test
The stock Core i9-7900X is faster than AMD's Threadripper 1950X, regardless of how we configure it. Tuning up to 3.9 GHz at least makes the Threadripper chip competitive.
This benchmark tends to favor physical cores, but we see some jockeying between the stock and overclocked SMT on/off configurations. Notably, Game mode provides impressive performance once we overclock. But it falls to the bottom of our chart in the CPU's stock form.
Civilization VI Graphics Test
The Civilization VI graphics test finds the Local/SMT configuration leading narrowly at stock and overclocked settings. Considering the gulf between Creator mode and the NUMA-enabled configurations (Game mode, Local/SMT On, and Local/SMT), this test appears to favor localized memory access.
Intel's Core i9-7900X suffers due to some of the performance regressions associated with Skylake-X's mesh architecture.
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