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VRMark, 3DMark & AotS: Escalation
Futuremark's VRMark test lets you gauge your system's suitability for use with the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, even if you don't currently own an HMD. The Orange Room test is based on the suggested system requirements for current-generation HTC Vive and Oculus Rift HMDs. Futuremark defines a passing score as anything above 109 FPS.
As expected, we notice slight variation between the stock Core i7-7700K and its near-identical -7740X counterpart. Testing at each chip's default memory settings (DDR4-2400 for the -7700K and DDR4-2666 for the -7740X) likely contributes some of the difference. And we notice the same behavior with the stock and overclocked settings.
3DMark's DX11 and DX12 tests follow a similar pattern. The beefier multi-core CPUs leverage their extra threads to take commanding leads in these compute-intensive tests. But tuning brings the -7740X within striking range of the overclocked six-core Ryzen 5 1600X. Intel's Kaby Lake-X model enjoys a greater lead over the -7700K in the DX11 physics test, which we chalk up to an extra 200 MHz of overclocking headroom.
We encountered some strangeness during the 3DMark API overhead test. Core i7-7740X lags its -7700K sibling by a large margin during the DX12 and Vulkan sequences; overclocking does little to correct the disparity. We suspect that this is a 3DMark-specific issue, since most of our DX12-based gaming benchmarks don't concur with these results. The API test is relatively new and has received a few recent updates. It's possible that we see another patch to address this unexpected measurement.
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation favors core count over other factors, so we observe the expected variance between 4C/8T Core i7 CPUs and the more well-endowed processors.
Core i7-7740X exhibits a minor gain compared to the -7700K at both stock and overclocked settings. Interestingly, we encounter less variability and frame time outliers with the -7740X than the -7700K, which could be a result of slightly more aggressive memory settings. The slight bump in overclocked frequency only equates to a 2.34% advantage, though.
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