CPU Performance
As you might expect, the dual-core processors struggled with the minimum frame rates dipping to and below 30fps. Even AMD's Athlon X4 860K struggled and while it was better than the slower clocked Intel dual-core processors, the minimum wasn't great when using the Titan X. AMD's FX-series also suffered from rather low minimum frame rates. Granted the FX-9590 didn't dip below 70fps, it was still much slower than the Core i7 processors.
Here we see that when it comes to the minimum frame rate, CPU frequency is extremely important. The move from 4GHz to 4.5GHz netted 9% more performance.
Compared to the Core i7-6700K, the 6600K is notably down on the minimum frame rate. Even at 4.5GHz, the 6700K was a little over 50% faster which is quite unexpected. The 6700K was only 3% faster when comparing the average frame rate but those minimums are surprising.
Not just the minimum but also the average frame rate really suffers on the FX-series. At 4.5GHz the FX-9590 still can't match the 6700K running at just 2.5GHz. In fact, the minimum frame rate was still 24% lower!
Something that really shocked us about the CPU performance in Gears of War 4 was how much slower the Core i5 processors were compared to the Core i7 models. Having tested with the Titan X we decided to see how things look with a Radeon GPU, the Fury X no less. The above results are more in line with that we were expecting to see as the i5 is just 5fps slower when looking at the minimum and 1fps for the average. The FX-8350 was also very competitive here while the G1820 produced the same result seen previously.
Now with the GTX 980 Ti, a Maxwell GPU, we decided to run the same tests. The margins were much the same here. I wonder what a lower end Pascal GPU looks like, let's find out...
Interestingly here the margin between the Core i5 and i7 processors grows once again. Using the GTX 980 Ti, a GPU of similar performance the Core i7 was just 5% faster when comparing the minimum frame rate. However, with the GTX 1070 that margin grew to 19% in favor of the Core i7. The Core i5 was 2fps slower for the minimum while the i7 was 9fps faster. Disabling features such as async compute didn't change these margins.