VRMark, 3DMark & AotS: Escalation
VRMark & 3DMark
We aren't big fans of using synthetic benchmarks to measure game performance, but 3DMark's DX11 and DX12 CPU tests provide useful insight into the amount of raw horsepower available to the game engine.
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.
The VR test rewards a mixture of per-core performance and parallelism, so the tuned -7820X carves out a small lead over the Core i9-7900X due to its better overclock.
Conversely, the heavily-threaded CPU and physics tests score higher on a 10-core -7900X. The Ryzen processors fare well in metrics optimized for parallelism, but Skylake-X's higher performance per clock cycle goes unmatched.
Core i7-7820X has a higher base and overclocked frequency than the -7900X, which helps explain its performance advantage in the API tests. However, a few extra frequency bins shouldn't overshadow the -7900X's extra cores in our threaded DX12 and Vulkan tests. Perhaps fewer cores generating traffic across the mesh is a good thing in latency-sensitive workloads?
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation scales exceedingly well with core count, so the Core i7-7820X trails Intel's -7900X in our results.
The Ryzen processors still can't overtake Skylake-X. However, they do dispatch Core i7-7700K with relative ease. This Kaby Lake-based chip is similar to Core i7-7740X, which Intel inexplicably shoehorned into X299 alongside our Skylake-X models. Because the -7740X makes so little sense, we're focusing our comparison on the more popular -7700K.
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