AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review: Why Is This Amazon's Best Selling CPU?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 18, 2020 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | 1080p Ultra |
| Average FPS |  |
| 95th Percentile |  |
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Sonik7x - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Would be nice to see 1440p benchmarks across all games, also would be nice to see a comparison against an i7-5930K running which is also a 6c/12T CPUET - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Would be even nicer to see newer games. Anandtech reviews seem to be stuck in 2018, both for games and for apps, and that makes them a lot less relevant a read than they could be.Dolda2000 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
You exaggerate. The point of a benchmark suite can't really be to contain the specific workload you're going to put on the CPU (since that's extremely unlikely to be the case anyway), but to be representative of typical workloads, and I think the application selection here is quite adequate for that. In comparison, I find it much more important to have more comparison data in the Bench database. There may be a stronger case to be made for games, but I find even that slightly doubtful.MASSAMKULABOX - Saturday, May 23, 2020 - link
Not only that , but slightly older games are much more stable and have most of the performance ironed out. New games are getting patches and downloads all the time, which often affect perfomance. I want to see "E" versions I.e 35/45wThreeDee912 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
They already mentioned in the 3300X review they'll be going back and adding in new games like Borderlands 3 and Gears Tactics: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15774/the-amd-ryzen...flyingpants265 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
I haven't used AnandTech benchmarks for years. They don't use enough CPUs/GPUs, they never include enough results from the previous generations, which is the most important thing when considering upgrades and $ value.Also, the "bench" tool does not include enough tests or hardware.
jabber - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Yeah nothing annoys me more than Tech Site benchmarks that only compare the new stuff to hardware than came out 6 months before it. If I see say a new GPU tested I want to see how it compares to my RX480 (that a lot of us will be looking to upgrade this year) than just a 5700XT.johnthacker - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Eh, nothing annoys me more than Tech Site benchmarks that only compare the new stuff to other new stuff. If I have an existing GPU or CPU and I'm not sure if it's worth it for me to upgrade or stick with what I've got, I want to see how something new compares to my existing hardware so I can know whether it's worth upgrading or whether I might as well wait.Pewzor - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
I mean Gamer's Nexus uses old games as well.Crazyeyeskillah - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Just to make this crystal clear, the reason they HAVE to use older games is because all of the PAST data has been run using those games. Most review sites only get sample hardware for a week or less to run the tests then return it in the mail. You literally wouldn't have anything to compare the data to if you only ran tests on the latest and greatest games and benchmarks.When I see people making this complaint I understand that they are new to computers and just want them to understand that there is a reason why benchmarks are limited. Most hardware review sites don't make any money, or if they do, it's enough to pay one or MAYBE two staff members (poorly.) Ad revenue is garbage due to add blockers on all your browsers, and legitimate sites that don't spam blickbaity rumors as news are shutting down. Just look what happened to Hardocp.com, one of the last true honest review sites.
The idea that hardware sites all have stockpiles of every system imaginable and the thousands of hours it would take to constantly setup and run all the new games and benchmarks is pretty comical.