Intel Core i7-6700K And Z170 Chipset Review: Skylake For Enthusiasts

Name: Intel Core i7-6700K and Z170 Chipset Review: Skylake For Enthusiasts
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, November 22, 2015, 08:00 AM EDT

Low-Res Gaming: DirectX and OpenGL

Page 8: Low-Res Gaming: DirectX and OpenGL

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis (DirectX), Bioshock Infinite (DirectX) and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (OpenGL). When testing processors with some games, we drop the resolution and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Low-Resolution Gaming: Crysis, Bioshock, and ET: Quake Wars

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

The Core i7-6700K's results in our low-res game tests are all over the map, for a couple of reasons. Note that we tested these games both with and without a discrete GPU installed to asses the performance of the CPU and its integrated graphic core. With the discrete GPU installed, the Core i7-6700K led the pack, with the highest framerates in both games. When using the HD 530 series IGP, however, performance takes an obvious hit.

In this Bioshock benchmark, we're back on integrated graphics, and as you can see, the HD 530 series GPU in the Core i7-6700K pulled ahead of all of the other integrated graphics solutions we tested, save for the Iris Pro 6200 series engine incorporated into the Broadwell-based Core i7-5775C.