More cores and PCIe 3.0 are winners here, but no GPU configuration has scaled above two GPUs. Everything else stays relatively similar.
The power of PCIe 3.0 is more apparent with two 7970 GPUs, however it is worth noting that only processors such as the i5-2500K and above have actually improved their performance with the second GPU. By virtue of not having a PCIe 3.0 AMD motherboard in for testing, the bad rap falls on AMD until PCIe 3.0 becomes part of their main game. A big part of what makes Civ5 perform at the best rates seems to be PCIe 3.0, followed by CPU performance – our PCIe 2.0 Intel processors are a little behind the PCIe 3.0 models. We test at 1440p, and report the average frame rate of a 5 minute test.Ĭivilization V is the first game where we see a gap when comparing processor families. Our Civilization V testing uses Ryan’s GPU benchmark test all wrapped up in a neat batch file. Civilization V seems to run into a scaling bottleneck very early on, and any additional GPU allocation only causes worse performance.
With the later drivers used for this review, the situation has improved but only slightly, as you will see below. Being on the older 12.3 Catalyst drivers were somewhat of a nightmare, giving no scaling, and as a result I dropped it from my test suite after only a couple of reviews. A game that has plagued my testing over the past twelve months is Civilization V.