Intel i7-4960X Ivy Bridge 1080P Gaming Benchmarks

While lower resolution gaming highlights processor bottlenecks, most people use slightly higher resolution monitors and want to play with increased detail settings. In these situations, the CPU tends to take a back seat to the graphics processor but even at 1080P (ie: 1920x1080) a slower CPU can still have a drastic impact upon in-game performance. In order to illustrate this, we have carried over the games from our previous tests, pumped detail levels to their max and used the increasingly popular 1080P resolution standard.

RESULTS: With the CPU taking a bit more of a back seat in the higher resolution tests, the situation becomes a bit less defined but once again, we’d say the Haswell architecture has a distinct advantage. Ivy Bridge-E does remain near the top of our charts but it never becomes a clear winner, often featuring less than a 3% improvement over its predecessors.

While lower resolution gaming highlights processor bottlenecks, most people use slightly higher resolution monitors and want to play with increased detail settings. In these situations, the CPU tends to take a back seat to the graphics processor but even at 1080P (ie: 1920x1080) a slower CPU can still have a drastic impact upon in-game performance. In order to illustrate this, we have carried over the games from our previous tests, pumped detail levels to their max and used the increasingly popular 1080P resolution standard.

RESULTS: The trend of middling performance increases continues here with the 4960X featuring limited benefits over other current generation Intel processors. Even against Sandy Bridge-E, the benefits are slim to none.

While our standard in-game testing consists of slightly older but still popular titles, we decided to throw in a number of additional, newer games. Each of these puts a significant amount of load on the CPU but many are also multi-core optimized.

All of the standard testing guidelines apply here as well though there is one major difference: instead of using FRAPS, we are utilizing the FCAT tool. This captures frames in real time before analyzing them, allowing for a much more accurate depiction of what will eventually be displayed onscreen. Once again, a GTX 670 has been used.

The first few newer games show a trend towards the same results we saw in the previous tests. The i7-4770K is often the fastest processor around since most titles can’t take advantage of more than four cores.

On the other hand, Crysis 3 uses additional CPU cores for various physics tasks and Company of Heroes 2 is fully multi core aware, making use of up to 12 threads for post processing calculation and AI. As a result, these two games allow the i7-4960X to surge ahead, though it doesn’t beat the 12-thread i7-3960X by all that much. Even AMD’s FX-9590 turns in an impressive showing every now and then.

In our last few gaming tests, the i7-4770K remains ahead of the pack more often than not. It does indeed seem like the Haswell architecture’s IPC improvements have led directly to better in-game framerates. Once again though, Tomb Raider does buck that trend and allows Ivy Bridge-E to eke out a single win.