The Climb
The Climb is a CryEngine-based title that Crytek suggests pairing with a Core i5-4590, at least. And if Robinson was any indication, this game might be expected to brutalize our lowest-end CPUs.
In fact, the dropped frames we see on our Core i3-6320 are even worse than they were in Robinson, causing the dual-core chip to average 80 delivered frames per second.
FX-8350 fares worse on paper, as it imposes high-enough frame times on our GeForce GTX 1080 Ti that the runtime kicks over into ASW on several occasions. But the resulting experience is smoother—we prefer the FX’s 1800 synthesized frames to the Core i3’s 1500 dropped frames.
Core i9, Core i7, and Ryzen 7 all appear to perform admirably. Let’s convert those frame times to frame rates once more...
Similar to Robinson, this CryEngine-based title favors Core i9 ever-so-slightly more than Core i7. This time, however, Ryzen 7 lands ahead of Core i3, which is of course hampered by dropped frames.
We know there’s an issue here from Core i3’s 50th percentile frame time of 11.5ms...and it only gets worse from there. By the time we’re looking at the 99th percentile, frames take as long as 14.5ms to render. And the worst-case frame time is a sluggish 29ms.
Incidentally, that’s right up there with FX-8350, though the FX-based platform’s other results are even worse. ASW cuts in early to smooth out those less-than-ideal render times, though.
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