Battlefield 4, Grid 2, And Metro: Last Light
Battlefield 4
I knew the content creation, productivity, and media encoding benchmarks would make the Core i7-5960X look good. After all, a great many of those tests were selected months and years ago for their ability to isolate host processor performance. But I’m counting on the games to show value in the six- and even four-core processors, since they often favor architecture and clock rate over core count.
Battlefield 4 gives us an early taste of that hypothesis in practice; the Core i7-5820K and -5930K take first and second place. More surprising is that the Core i7-4790K falls to last. It centers on Haswell and sports the highest clock rate in our comparison. Big L3 caches have to be giving the eight- and other six-core CPUs their advantage.
Grid 2
Known for its host processor and memory dependency, Grid 2 might have been expected to exhibit a wider delta between first and last place. But all of these CPUs feed a single GeForce GTX Titan quickly. The Core i7-5820K notably claims its second first-place finish, followed by Intel’s Core i7-4790K. It’s good to know you don’t need to drop disgusting amounts of cash on your next platform to get great frame rates, right? Invest in your graphics subsystem instead.
Metro: Last Light
Even though Metro is a GPU showcase, we can’t help but notice the Core i7-5820K in first place again. The -4790K and -5930K following it are just slightly faster than three generations of Extreme Edition processors, plus a $2000 Xeon.
