Project CARS, Rise of the Tomb Raider, And The Division
Project CARS
Slightly Mad Studios designed the Project CARS game engine specifically to promote parallelism by breaking tasks down into smaller chunks across available resources. The end result is a sophisticated engine that scales well with additional CPU cores and higher clock rates.
The prevalence of Kaby Lake at the top of this chart tells us that the game responds well to high IPC throughput and clock rates. After all, even the Core i5-7600K's four physical cores outpace Core i7-6900K's 8C/16T configuration (despite dropping to a lower minimum frame rate).
AMD's Ryzen CPUs line up predictably, given their frequencies.
As we've come to expect from Project CARS, we don't notice much of a performance drop as we shift to 2560x1440. This serves to underline the game's CPU-bound nature.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Just as we saw Deus Ex split into two distinct performance groups, so to does Rise of the Tomb Raider draw attention to the different architectures being tested. This time, however, it's Kaby Lake/Broadwell-E in the lead. Clearly, there's work to be done optimizing for Ryzen.
Ryzen 7 closes the gap at 2560x1440, suggesting a more graphics-bound scenario.
The Division
Tom Clancy's The Division is graphically demanding all the way down to 1920x1080, allowing Ryzen 7 1800X to climb in ahead of Core i7-6900K. Both Kaby Lake-based CPUs land in first and second place, but their performance advantage is imperceptible. The variable we cannot ignore here is price: the Core i5-7600K, especially, is a much more affordable solution if you're gaming-focused.
The Core i7-6900K lands back in the lead as we jump to 2560x1440. But at what cost? Curiously, Intel's Core i7-7700K tumbles three positions. We tested this condition several times to verify the result, but it does stand out as a possible outlier. The Ryzen 7 1800X matches the Core i5-7600K, though it does suffer a lower minimum frame rate during the test.
