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Grand Theft Auto V, Hitman & Shadow of Mordor
Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V continues to favor Intel architectures and, more generally, multi-core designs. The Core i7-8700K offers 7.6% more performance than the -7700K at stock settings. This grows to a 11.5% lead after some tuning.
Kaby Lake- and Coffee Lake-based Core i7 processors set themselves apart from the pack during our benchmark, specifically offering a 16-25% performance advantage over the Ryzen models at stock settings.
Hitman (2016)
Core i7-7800X finally shows up in the top half of our chart thanks to its effective architecture and 6C/12T configuration. It's still no match for the -8700K, though, probably due to its more conservative 4 GHz Turbo Boost ceiling.
The new -8700K offers the best performance in stock form, demonstrating a 9 FPS advantage over its nearest competitor. Meanwhile, Core i7-7700K turns the tables with a slight lead after overclocking. Given their similar architectures and manually-defined frequencies, a little variance there is expected. Consider the chips to be tied after tuning.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
The Core i7-8700K surprisingly falls behind its predecessor at stock settings. We examined each chip's Turbo Boost behavior and discovered that the -8700K ran through at a higher frequency. But, like the -7700K, it doesn’t reach peak frequencies. Rather, it drops to lower clock rates throughout our run.
As mentioned at the outset of our performance testing, we saw higher benchmark numbers from the lower-end Core i7-8700 in several games. Coffee Lake and its Z370 platform are new, so perhaps firmware tuning will iron out some of these issues over time.
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