Quake Champions Early Access Performance Review

CPU Performance – Ryzen & Intel 

 

Methodology

Full on CPU performance testing is something that is relatively new in our PC game performance analysis pieces, with Ryzen performance being a new addition to our hardware test suite.  

Here we have tested the game using an Intel i7 6850K Broadwell-E Hex-core and an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X over a variety of core configurations when playing the game at 1080p max settings on a GTX 1080. Both CPUs are run at similar clock speeds. 

We ran our Ryzen 7 1700X with 8/16, 6/12, 4/8 and 4/4 core/thread configurations to closely match results from Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 processors. Note that in all of these tests that 16MB of L3 cache was active and that these are not exact emulations of each Ryzen series CPU at the same clock speeds. Even so, these results represent a reasonable ballpark figure.  

On the Intel side, we tested 6/12, 4/8, 4/4 and 2/4 core configurations to represent Intel’s current generation i3, i5 and i7 CPU core configurations.  

 

Quake Champions

Sadly in our Quake Champions tests we could not use actual gameplay from online matches, instead opting it use a single player custom match. Here repeatability is important and that cannot be achieved in multiplayer, where players will be in different placed doing different things and otherwise making benchmarking impossible. 

Quake Champions has no bot mode, so our benchmarking what conducted without Online or Bot controlled characters, making CPU performance benchmarking inaccurate and unrepresentative of the final game. We used the most demanding map that we could find in our benchmark tests producing the following results that show similar performance on all of the CPU configurations that we have tested. 

Here we see Intel offer a slight lead over our AMD Ryzen CPUs, though the differences here are minor, with both all configs providing a similar gaming experience. 

Intel’s dual-core quad-thread setup did have a small performance drop in our benchmark run, so we did play some multiplayer matches that compared a dual-core, 4-thread configuration to a 4 core config to see if there was a notable difference in gameplay. Here we did not see the 2-core, 4-thread config drop below 120FPS, with the 4-core, 4-thread config never dipping that low on our GTX 1080. Sadly these results cannot be seen as anything other than anecdotal, given the different variety of maps that we played and the inconsistent nature of Multiplayer. 

In Quake Champions players will more often than not be GPU limited and to put it simply those who aim for a constant 144Hz+ framerate/refresh rate should not be using a dual-core CPU.