Benchmarks: Civilization VI, Dawn of War III
Next up we have another DirectX 12 title: Civilization VI. For testing I used the GPU benchmark and measure 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 and given the results it has provided over time it appears very accurate.
Here we see something different to the results just shown when testing Battlefield 1. I'm not sure what it is about Civilization VI but the game runs significantly better on AMD's Ryzen CPUs when using a Radeon graphics card (when playing in the DirectX 12 mode).
It's hard to say if this is an indication of how future native DirectX 12 titles will perform on Ryzen in relation to Intel, or if this title is just some strange anomaly. Again, the testing method here doesn't favor slower processors as some believe based on information given by Gamers Nexus. For this test, we're not using the turn-based AI benchmark.
We're not really interested in how long it takes the CPU to calculate the AI's turn and I realize this turn based game doesn't really require a high frame rate, but the frame rate is still more of what I'm interested in because it could indicate how future DX12 titles will perform.
Similar margins were recorded at 1080p as well and this is a heavily CPU bound game so we aren't seeing much of a reduction in frame rate. This is again true at 1440p where the Ryzen 5 1600 is a massive 47% faster than the Core i5-8400 when comparing the minimum frame rate result. Honestly I'm not sure how it's possible for Ryzen to be so much faster in this game but it's not because its rendering a static scene for a longer period of time.
Dawn of War III is a DirectX 11 title and here we see that the overclocked Ryzen 5 1600 processor is able to match the Core i5-8400 at 720p. The average frame rate was only boosted by 6% over the 1600X but that was enough to match the Core i5 processor. That said the 7700K still remains out in front here.
Performance goes virtually unchanged at 1080p so we are obviously CPU-bound here and not limited by the Vega 64 graphics card. Much the same is also found at 1440p as well though the overclocked Ryzen 5 1600 just edges out the Core i5-8400.