Intel Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K, i7-7700, i5-7600K, i5-7600 Review

Results: Gaming And Integrated Graphics (iGP)

3D Performance with a Discrete Graphics Card

Of course, gamers want to know just how well Intel’s new Kaby Lake CPUs fare under the latest games. In the next two tests we used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition.

Discrete Graphics: Watch Dogs 2

Watch Dogs 2 likes to have four physical cores, and continues to scale with more threads enabled via SMT. However, the game’s performance doesn’t ramp up linearly with thread count. A fast quad-core CPU without SMT is perfectly ample.

Discrete Graphics: Metro: Last Light

Metro: Last Light uses a lot of computing power for physics, especially since we disabled PhysX. We also skipped any form of anti-aliasing and SSAO to achieve the highest possible frame rate. These CPUs don't bottleneck performance, but the difference between the fastest and slowest ones are approximately 10 percent.

As we've seen already, corresponding Kaby Lake and Skylake CPUs at the same clock frequency perform the same.

3D Performance with Integrated Graphics (iGP)

Nobody’s going to play current games on integrated graphics after spending big bucks on a high-end platform. Still, we tested two titles using settings that provided playable frame rates anyway, even though Intel’s drivers don’t really deal with this kind of task very well. We also want to know if AutoCAD works with an integrated graphics solution. Since AMD’s FX-9590 is the only test CPU without integrated graphics, we used one of AMD’s APUs, the A10-7890K, instead.

Integrated Graphics (iGP): Half Life 2 - Lost Coast

Half Life 2 runs on anything, even the most entry-level GPUs. The only host processing attribute that matters is clock rate and, by extension, IPC throughput. When this game was made, nobody was thinking about four or more x86 cores. Intel’s graphics driver works fairly well in this case. Consequently, the performance of AMD’s APU takes a hit due to its lackluster CPU. The game runs on one core alone, and the graph reflects this.

Integrated Graphics (iGP): Bioshock Infinite

Next, we take a look at what happens when we push the graphics solution harder. Without CPU performance bottlenecking the frame rate, AMD's APU rules supreme. That doesn’t mean it's actually fast, though.

Integrated Graphics (iGP): AutoCAD 3D Performance

All of the CPUs we're testing work well for 2D; the results we generate are almost identical to what we saw from Nvidia's Quadro P5000. The CPU limits performance in every scenario for the reasons we've already covered.

The CPU remains the most important component as we switch over to 3D, translating to similar results. High clock rates and IPC throughput rule once again, and AMD’s APU can’t compete in spite of its better graphics solution and driver. It’s time for Raven Ridge. We can't wait to see how it fares.