Dawn of War III, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dirt 4
Next up we have the Dawn of War III results and here the stock 4770K looks particularly weak, though again I should note that it only dipped to 59fps and was able to deliver smooth, perfectly playable performance. Overclocked it did look much more respectable and was not at least on par with the new Core i5-8400.
Compared to the overclocked 4770K, the 8700K was 17% faster for the minimum result and 11% for the average. 17% sounds like a decent margin but again, going from 116fps to 129fps isn't a noticeable gain in this title. Even the difference between dipping to 71fps from 83fps isn't noticeable, or at least it wasn't in my opinion.
I recently tested many of these CPUs in Dawn of War III using Vega 64 Liquid Cooled, so I thought as a bonus I'd add the 4770K to those results as well. I'm yet to test all the Ryzen CPUs with the GTX 1080 Ti so for those wanting to know how the 4770K stacks up against say the 1600X, this will give you a good idea.
Here we can see with a slower graphics card the overclocked 4770K is able to match the 7700K and isn't a great deal slower than the 8700K. Vega actually does quite poorly in this title, for example Vega 64 Liquid Cooled isn't much faster than Vega 56 and therefore both are similar to the GTX 1070.
For this test that's kind of a good thing as it shows that for those using something like Vega 56 or a GTX 1070 there really isn't much to be had by upgrading to the 8700K from the 4770K, especially if you're happy overclocking. I'll talk more about this later.
Moving on, we have the Deus Ex Mankind Divided results using the DirectX 12 API and again the stock 4770K looks a little slow. Even after overclocking, it only just manages to out-edge the Core i5-7600K, meaning the 7700K was 25% faster when comparing the minimum frame rate. That said, the 7700K along with the 8700K hit a GPU bottleneck and therefore those gaming at 1440p with a GTX 1080 Ti will likely see no difference between the 4770K and 8700K, so keep that in mind.
With Dirt 4 we see fairly consistent 1% low results with the GTX 1080 Ti across all CPUs tested. So although the 8700K allowed for an average of 196fps, it was still just 8% faster compared to the overclocked 4770K on average and just 6% for the minimum. Since even the stock 4770K maintained over 100fps at all times, it's fair to say even for high refresh rate gamers the 8700K offers little to nothing over a fourth-gen Core i7.