Today we're doing a niggling benchmarking, a little playing around with Assassinator's Creed Origins to see how it behaves on different CPUs. For those of you unaware Assassin's Creed Origins was recently released, and information technology has been creating a bit of a stir in the PC tech community due how aggressively it utilizes the CPU.

Upon release a few media outlets scrambled to the benchmarks and information technology chop-chop became apparent that the game was extremely CPU intensive and not in the way that ARMA 3 or Planet Coaster are. Rather than just taxing a few threads heavily the game eats up cores, lots of cores. In that location are reports of it using up a Threadripper 1920X for example. As a upshot modern quad-cores were getting slayed and in that location were reports that the game was only unplayable on the Core i5-7600K. And well, that peaked our interest.

We've already seen the 7600K and other quad-core CPUs struggling in large 64-role player Battlefield 1 battles and while the performance isn't always ideal, it'due south certainly playable in our opinion. Anyway I believe it's the Computer Base of operations results that have have acquired near of the excitement as they showed the Core i5-7600K getting trampled by the Ryzen 5 1500X as it only managed to friction match the Ryzen 3 1300X. Notwithstanding the ane% depression results were the nigh shocking as the i5-7600K dipped downwards to 41 fps making it slightly slower than the 1300X. Honestly I'm not sure how that'south possible, but let's ignore that for a moment.

Essentially the 7600K was almost 30% slower than the Ryzen 5 1600X and almost 40% slower than the 7700K. Countering this information though, were results published past GameGPU around 3 days earlier showing the 7600K never dropping below 60 fps and consequently beating the Ryzen 5 1400 while easily beating the Ryzen iii CPUs. The higher core count Ryzen parts however practise very well in their test but the 7600K hardly looks pathetic.

Looking at where each media outlet tested, equally all-time equally I can tell GameGPU actually tested a more than enervating department of the game, which adds to the confusion. Therefore nosotros decided to have a look and see if nosotros could piece of work out what was going on.

For measuring CPU performance nosotros've found getting on your steed, in this case a camel, and having a trot through the open-world city of Siwa (seewa) is the way to go, in that location's more often than not loads of non histrion characters hither that give the CPU a hard time. So using the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and three quality presets, let'south have a look at some of the results in graph grade before checking out some gameplay.

The Benchmarks

Let's start with the Ultra High quality preset, we are using a GTX 1080 Ti after all. Here the 8th-gen Core series is limited to only over 90 fps on average with a i% low result of 71 fps. The 7700K roughly matched the boilerplate but was 7% slower for the minimum equally it's often close to being maxed out.

Then we encounter a pretty large drib for the 7600K which bottomed out at 52 fps making it 21% slower than the 7700K and 27% slower than the new Core i5-8400. This also means information technology's a tad slower than the Ryzen 7 1800X and Ryzen v 1600X, though faster than the R5 1500X.

We would just similar to point out that all CPUs were tested using the aforementioned DDR4-3200 CL14 retentiveness. I'll likewise get to it in a moment with some gameplay footage, only the 7600K every bit well equally the 1500X both provided highly playable functioning in decorated sections of the game.

Reducing the quality preset to high provides a decent performance uplift and the Core i5-7600K in particular does much better. Whereas the minimum frame rate for the 1500X was increased by 17% the 7600K saw a massive 27% increase to 66 fps and was now able to deliver very smooth performance. The 7700K was besides able to max out the GTX 1080 Ti alongside the 8th-gen Core processors.

Dropping downward to the medium preset only boosted the minimum frame rates of the Cadre i5-7600K and Ryzen CPUs by a small margin. Interestingly though, it did boost the minimum and average frame rates of the Cadre i7-7700K as well as the 8th-gen CPUs quite a bit, so that does suggest the Ryzen and 7600K processors are creating a system bottleneck.

Hither is a quick look at how the 7700K, 7600K and R5 1500X scaled using the diverse quality presets. We run across strong and consistent gains every bit the GTX 1080 Ti is afforded more animate room with the 7700K. The 7600K is near maxed out using Loftier, while the R5 1500X sees virtually no comeback from High to Medium.

Game Footage

Nosotros've seen the graphs and I know there'll been those screaming that bar graphs don't tell the full story, the 7600K would have been a stuttery mess. Well, in an effort to head off that noise hither is a look at some gameplay footage recorded with an external capture device. All footage was recorded at 1080p using the ultra high quality preset, and so worst example scenario then.

Start let's compare the six-core/six-thread Core i5-8600K to the half-dozen-core/12-thread Ryzen five 1600X. Hither you lot can run across that all half dozen-threads of the 8600K are heavily utilized and at times the processors are completely maxed out, yet frame rates remain high and more importantly consistent. The game was jitter costless in my testing. The CPU isn't overclocked, multi-core enhancement isn't enabled and we accept 16GBs of DDR4-3200 memory installed.

Something key to notation here is the GPU utilization which is locked pretty much at 97% on the 8600K system. At present it nosotros look at the R5 1600X, the GPU utilization is mixed in with the CPU threads and then sorry about that, we can see that GPU utilization is usually around 80% but does fluctuate quite a lot and at times dropped as low as 53%. This is interesting equally CPU utilization virtually never cracked 90% and was ofttimes around eighty%. Despite this due to the much lower GPU utilization the Ryzen CPU was overall much slower.

Okay so time for the quad-cores, the four-thread 7600K vs. the viii-thread 1500X. Both CPUs were utilized heavily, the 7600K was simply about constantly maxed out while the 1500X sat effectually 95% for the near role. GPU utilization was like at around 70 - 80% merely at times did leap up much higher on the Cadre i5 processors which is ultimately what gave information technology the edge. Nether heavy load they were much the aforementioned just when the CPU was afforded a little breathing room the 7600K ran away a petty.

The cardinal thing to note here is that even with a lot of NPCs effectually both CPUs provided a shine and playable experience.

For those wondering dropping the retentivity speed on the 7600K configuration to DDR4-2400, from 3200, reduced the frame rate past 5 - 10 fps. And so a decent reduction there but non massive and operation was nonetheless playable.

Putting It All Together

This wasn't a examination we planned for this week. In fact, nosotros have something much bigger in the works which yous'll see in the side by side mean solar day or 2, and so consider this a filler. The primary goal here was to run across how lower end CPUs, not low cease, "lower terminate" CPUs handle themselves in Assassin'southward Creed Origins. In particular nosotros were actually keen to see if the Core i5-7600K would get crushed in a game nosotros can accurately benchmark, but that wasn't to be.

Nosotros know the 7600K struggles in 64-role player Battlefield 1 battles, simply sadly it's admittedly impossible to accurately benchmark a multiplayer title. At that place's no point walking around in an empty map or avoiding the action, that defeats the purpose entirely.

Anyway, getting back on runway, the 7600K played Assassin's Creed Origins just fine and the section of the game we tested saw nada frame hitches. Nosotros're keen to explore the game more, but for now we are satisfied with the testing washed.

It was disappointing to observe that the Ryzen 7 1800X and R5 1600X couldn't concord a candle to the Core i5-8400 in spite of the rumors circulating the Internet. As many of y'all know we really like the Ryzen 5 1600 as a balanced/best value offering hither at TechSpot and while it did lay waste to the 7600K, Intel's speedily aging quad-core even so provided playable operation. Meanwhile the HT enabled Cadre i7-7700K was able to go on the 1600X in its rear view mirrors.

Shopping Shortcuts:

  • Assassin's Creed Origins on Amazon, Steam
  • Intel Core i5-8600K on Amazon, Newegg
  • Intel Cadre i5-8400 on Newegg
  • AMD Ryzen five 1600X on Amazon, Newegg
  • AMD Ryzen seven 1800X on Amazon, Newegg

In that location'due south certainly more than testing to be done but for now although Assassin's Creed Origins looks to be very heavy on the CPU, the results and functioning trends aren't that much different to other recently released titles such as Project Cars 2, just to cite an example.