Intel Core i9-10850K Review: The Real Intel Flagship
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 4, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core
- Z490
- 10th Gen Core
- Comet Lake
- LGA1200
- i9-10850K
Gaming Tests: Gears Tactics
Remembering the original Gears of War brings back a number of memories – some good, and some involving online gameplay. The latest iteration of the franchise was launched as I was putting this benchmark suite together, and Gears Tactics is a high-fidelity turn-based strategy game with an extensive single player mode. As with a lot of turn-based games, there is ample opportunity to crank up the visual effects, and here the developers have put a lot of effort into creating effects, a number of which seem to be CPU limited.
Gears Tactics has an in-game benchmark, roughly 2.5 minutes of AI gameplay starting from the same position but using a random seed for actions. Much like the racing games, this usually leads to some variation in the run-to-run data, so for this benchmark we are taking the geometric mean of the results. One of the biggest things that Gears Tactics can do is on the resolution scaling, supporting 8K, and so we are testing the following settings:
- 720p Low, 4K Low, 8K Low, 1080p Ultra
For results, the game showcases a mountain of data when the benchmark is finished, such as how much the benchmark was CPU limited and where, however none of that is ever exported into a file we can use. It’s just a screenshot which we have to read manually.
If anyone from the Gears Tactics team wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).
As with the other benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed. For this benchmark, we manually read each of the screenshots for each quality/setting/run combination. The benchmark does also give 95th percentiles and frame averages, so we can use both of these data points.
AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
Average FPS | ![]() |
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95th Percentile | ![]() |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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Machinus - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Put that piled higher and deeper to use and write an article about how binning affects IC design, before the variability in lithography. Other PhDs read this site tooFreckledTrout - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Its the top chart on the the second page. The AIDA stress tests where we are looking at around 260 watts.Machinus - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
There's a whole article in the chart?j@cko - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Nice try Intel. This reminded us of AMD during those FX days when they had nothing good to compete with Intel. Intel's complacency has proven to be quite costly and made some consumers quite bitter toward them. It's gonna take some time to fix that and win back consumer trust and confidence. For example, our company has switched to buying AMD (Ryzen) system since Zen+ and they do not plan on going back to Intel unless AMD goes rogue (complacent with tech and price). Even at my own household, we have built 5 or 6 systems and none of them are Intel.DannyH246 - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Yawn. More Intel crap.Desierz - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
I wonder what Rocket Lake temps will be like..goatfajitas - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
hotGrayswean - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Hence the name.Deicidium369 - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
same as here if you use the same janky passive HSFzodiacfml - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
why even work on this? Ryzen 5000 series?