Gaming Benchmarks
These benchmarks do not represent real-world gameplay by any stretch of the imagination. These tests are conducted using built-in benchmarking tools utilizing the game engine. These tests are designed to stress the CPU’s power system as well as ensure proper functionality. These are all run at CPU limited resolutions to try our best to remove the video card as a bottleneck.
One additional note about gaming performance is that these are average values. They do not tell the whole story. Specifically, Destiny 2’s low’s and high’s help tell a very different story than what the average reports are. Fortunately, while the lows are considerably lower than that of Intel CPU’s, the amount of frames that drop into the lowest range are extremely few.
As stated in previous articles, we are transitioning to providing more comprehensive data for gaming benchmarks. Leveraging some of the built-in tools, we are showing minimums, averages, and maximum frame rates. Frametimes are something we will work on including in the future as well. Unfortunately, we didn’t have that much lead time from Intel on this review.
3DMark 10
Here we can see the 10980XE achieving a slight edge over the other test configurations. Of course, the 9900K scores better, but it has a clock speed advantage.
Heaven
This result isn’t all that surprising either. The Core i9 10980XE has lower clocks than the 9900K and basically the same architecture. As a result, it doesn’t do as well. Interestingly, the Ryzen 9 3900X achieves the fastest result here.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint
Say what you will about Ghost Recon Breakpoint and its predatory microtransactions, the game comes with an impressive tool and feature set for benchmarking the game’s performance. You can see here that the Core i9 10980XE achieved the highest minimum frame rates. Core count or clock speed mattered very little. While the 10980XE did gain a slight increase on average and maximum frame rates, the minimum frame rate was unchanged.
The 3900X had the highest maximum frame rate, but the average and the low frame rates were way behind the Intel Core i9 10980XE. I hadn’t had time to benchmark the 9900K on this game as it was a last-minute change, so I do not have that for comparison.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
The odd trend of the 10980XE performing better with cores disabled continues here. Also, when overclocked, the 10980XE’s performance increases by a decent margin. The 3900X is the weakest entry, which doesn’t surprise me as this is one of the tests I’ve seen this occur inconsistently.
Hitman 2 (2019)
Again, disabling cores helps the 10980XE to perform better, but overclocking does a lot more for you in this test. Oddly, the 10980XE manages to achieve a better score than the Core i9 9900K.
Destiny 2
Destiny 2 is an odd game given the dichotomy of how it performs. At higher resolutions, it heavily favors Intel CPU’s which is something I’ve showcased in the past. However, HEDT chips like Threadripper and now the 10980XE run the game erratically. I have no explanation as to why, but previously when I had tested the 2nd Generation TR 2920X, we saw the same thing. I saw it quite a bit as that was what was in my personal rig at the time.