Ashes of the Singularity, Assassin's Creed Origins, Battlefield 1
Kickstarting our game benchmarks is Ashes of the Benchmark itself, a favorite for testing CPU performance. Starting with high quality settings at 1080p using a GTX 1080 Ti we see that the 5820K is very respectable, roughly matching the highly clocked 7700K. That said, it was up to 16% slower than the 8700K. Overclocking helped close the gap and now it's only the 1% low figure where the higher clocked 8700K holds an advantage.
Going crazy with the quality settings closes the gap right up and now the overclocked 5820K is on par with the test of the 8th gen Core processors due to a heavy GPU bottleneck. That said, at stock settings, the 1% low figure for the lesser-clocked 5820K did drop down to just 69 fps.
Then at 1440p as expected the GPU bottleneck grows even more extreme and now even the stock 5820K doesn't trail that far behind for the 1% low result.
Assassin's Creed Origins is another CPU-demanding game but out of the box the 5820K does reasonably well despite being much slower than the 7700K and all 8th gen series processors. That said, overclocking boosted the average frame rate by 16%. This placed the overclocked 5820K almost on par with the Core i5-8400 for the average frame rate but still slower for the minimum frame rate result.
Increasing the quality preset to ultra high closes the margin and now the overclocked 5820K is just 7% slower than the fastest CPUs tested when comparing the minimum frame rate result.
The results remains much the same even at 1440p and while the overclocked 5820K matched the overclocked 4770K and the 7700K, it did trail the 8700K. Still overall strong performance from the aging six-core CPU.
Using the medium quality preset at 1080p in Battlefield 1 really gives the GTX 1080 Ti room to breath. Overclocking the 5820K boosted the average frame rate by 13% and this placed it on par with the stock 7700K, a decent result and it meant we saw frame rates in excess of 120fps at all times.
With the ultra preset enabled, the overclocked 5820K is able to roughly match the Core i5-8600K and really only slips behind slightly for the 1% low result.
Then we see something quite interesting when moving to 1440p. Here the overclocked 5820K falls behind the 4770K and Core i5-8400 when comparing the average frame rate, though the minimum is very strong. Here we're just 10% slower than the overclocked 8700K but we're also quite GPU bound.