Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Project CARS, Far Cry Primal & Rise of the Tomb Raider
Project CARS
There's a solid scaling trend from Intel's disappointing Core i7-7800X up through its impressive -8700K.
Core i7-8700K does offer better performance than -7700K out of the box, but as you get more graphics-bound, the two increasingly converge. That means enthusiasts specifically focused on gaming will see little benefit from upgrading, particularly if they own lower-end graphics cards.
Far Cry Primal
Far Cry Primal is another title that doesn't respond as well to Core i7-8700K as we would expect. Again, lower performance than the -7700K at stock settings implies that we just aren't getting the full benefit of Coffee Lake yet. It does gain some ground when we lock both CPUs at 4.9 GHz, but -8700K fails to completely overtake Kaby Lake.
The Ryzen processors obviously trail Intel's offerings in this game and many others. But they're still solid value plays benefiting from lower prices and more affordable platforms. One of Ryzen's greatest advantages is higher performance in threaded workloads like rendering. Coffee Lake challenges this with more cores, so our content creation benchmarks could upset the narrative we've been telling since Ryzen's launch.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Core i7-7700K and -8700K offer strong, but similar performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider. The Core i5-7600K bests them both at stock settings, though.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
