Benchmarks: Civilization IV, Dawn of War III
Next up we have another DirectX 12 title: Civilization VI. For testing I used the GPU benchmark and measured performance with PresentMon. The test runs for 30 seconds and it takes the same amount of time on a Pentium G4560 as it does the 8700K for example, as far as I can tell it's an accurate test given the results it has provided over time.
At 720p we see quite a large difference between the Core i5-7600K and Core i7-7700K. The i7 model is 24% faster when comparing the minimum frame rate. However, the 7700K is only able to match the Ryzen 5 1500X in this title and is therefore slower than both the 1600X and 1800X.
The new 8700K is only a fraction faster than the 7700K and its minimum frame rate of 68fps places it roughly on par with the 1500X and 1600X while the 1800X is still a good bit faster. Note that the Ryzen CPUs don't look nearly as impressive in this title when using a GeForce graphics card.
Civilization VI is a heavily CPU bound title and therefore moving to 1080p doesn't change much, though it did help extend the Ryzen 7 1800X's margin ever so slightly.
At 1440p the frame rate is again slightly reduced but the margins all remain much the same.
Dawn of War III
Dawn of War III is a DirectX 11 title and it doesn't play particularly well with the Ryzen CPUs when compared to the competing Intel parts. The Ryzen 7 1800X and R5 1600X are really only able to match the Core i5-7600K while the rest of Intel line up pulls well ahead.
The new Core i7-8700K for example is roughly 20% faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X and R5 1600X. Little changes when increasing the resolution to 1080p, here the faster Intel CPUs just drop a frame or two. Then finally at 1440p we drop a few more frames but overall the margins remain much the same.