Robo Recall
If EVE: Valkyrie is the game that hooked a lot of enthusiasts into spending money on VR, then Robo Recall is the title that reminded them they made a good decision. Ironically, Epic Games released it as a free-to-play title (with the purchase of Touch) based on its Unreal Engine 4.
Our benchmark is 150 seconds long, running from the beginning of the first mission. We use High Graphics Quality, 4x on the Antialiasing MSAA scale, a pixel density of 1.0, and no adaptive resolution. Planar Reflections and Indirect Shadows are both enabled.
FX-8350 posts high frame times and lots of up/down variance. This causes AMD’s previous-gen platform to force our GeForce GTX 1080 Ti into ASW mode for about 23% of the test.
Ryzen 7 1800X has some issues of its own, though. A number of frame time spikes cause a disproportionately high dropped frame count. Core i3 isn’t immune, either.
We asked Epic Games founder Tim Sweeny for any information he might be able to provide about how UE4 handles the latest CPU architectures. He responded that the engine generally provides excellent scaling to four cores, and worthwhile scaling up to 8-10 cores in complex scenes.
He continues, “We'll be improving this significantly over time. Sixteen cores in a consumer CPU was a (very pleasant) surprise to everyone, and there's some good headroom for future optimization. Bottom line, if the CPU makers can keep it up, we have solutions that will scale to lots more cores, given sufficient development time.”
The unconstrained frame rate graph shows Intel’s Core i7 and Core i9 on equal footing, while Ryzen 7 and Core i3—the CPUs that dropped the most frames—line up fairly evenly as well. FX-8350 presents the lowest frame rate; however, more than 3000 synthesized frames help smooth the slower platform’s performance, preventing some of the drops that’d otherwise show up without ASW.
Core i7-7700K’s strong performance is evident from its worst-case frame time: a mere 11.8ms.
Ryzen 7’s issues with frame time spikes aren’t prevalent in the raw data. Ninety-nine percent of the CPU’s frames are rendered in less than 11.8ms. But that last percent includes frames rendered in up to 85ms.
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