Benchmarks: World of Tanks, Counter Strike: GO, Far Cry Primal
World of Tanks is geared toward single-thread performance, so higher clock speeds rule here and this is why the Ryzen 3 1300X is able to outpace the Ryzen 5 1400. The 7700K's high out of the box operating frequency also gives it an advantage here though with something like the GTX 1060 you won't see any real difference.
As we move to the GTX 1070, the Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs pull ahead and they now offer around 10% more frames than the R3 1300X. Then with the GTX 1080 installed the 7700K races ahead and is now 19% faster than the Core i5-7400 and almost 30% faster than the G4560.
Like World of Tanks, Counter Strike: Global Offensive doesn't utilize multi-core CPUs and the 7700K's superior IPC performance and high operating frequency gives it a significant advantage in this title. Even with the GTX 1060 installed we see a rather large difference in performance between the Core i5 and i7 CPUs when compared to the Pentium and Ryzen CPUs. Once we get up to the GTX 1070 and 1080 graphics cards, the CPU bottlenecking is quite extreme with most of the CPUs tested.
Battlefield 1 and F1 2016 are CPU intensive games that utilize multi-core CPUs very well. Far Cry Primal on the other hand isn't particularly demanding on the CPU and this is more of a GPU bound title.
That being the case, it's unsurprisng to see no real difference in performance with the GTX 1060. Moving to the GTX 1070 we find that the Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs are able to deliver noticeably better 1% low results – of course we can overclock the Ryzen CPUs but I'll look at that a bit later on.
With the GTX 1080 we see much the same performance on all the processors tested with the exception of the 7700K. While the G4560, Core i5 and Ryzen CPUs all limit the GTX 1080 to 1070 like performance, the 7700K boosts the average frame rate by 32%, making it 41% faster than the G4560. I don't suspect anyone would pair the G4560 with the GTX 1080, but this is why it's a bad idea if you happen to be considering it.