Test Notes
We tested our game suite at both DDR4-2133 and DDR4-2666 and recorded performance deltas in a few titles. We've included DDR4-2133 results in the titles that experienced uplift beyond the normal standard deviation. That bodes well for Zhaoxin's future support for DDR4-3200, albeit with the stipulation that you'll need a pricey kit with the pre-defined DDR4-3200 SPD.
VRMark and 3DMark
Synthetic gaming benchmarks often aren't indicative of real-world performance, but the 3DMark DX11 and DX12 tests measure the amount of raw computational horsepower exposed to the game engine. For now, most of today's game engines don't scale as linearly with additional compute resources, but these tests help us gauge how games could exploit processing resources as the engines become more sophisticated.
In the synthetic world of the Fire Strike benchmark, the Zhaoxin processor scales well and beats out nearly all of the dual-core competition, with the exception of the overclocked Ryzen 3 3000G. The Core i5-7400, which Zhaoxin has used as a comparison point, leads by ~8%, which isn't too bad of a showing for the newcomer. However, flipping over to the DX12 physics test finds the Zhaoxin processor barely edging out the AMD's Bristol Ridge A10-9700. The previous-gen Athlon processors, with a mere two cores to their name, also outperform the KX-U6780A.
VRMark test prizes per-core performance (a mixture of frequency and IPC), exposing the KX-U6780A's weakness in lightly-threaded workloads. Even the Bristol Ridge chip, which hails from 2016, sails past the Khaoxin processor. Meanwhile, the Core i5-7400 nears the top of the chart.
Civilization VI AI and Stockfish
Civilization VI prizes per-core performance, so it isn't surprising to see the Intel chips take the lead in this test of AI engine performance in a turn-based strategy game. The KX-U6780A isn't as competitive here as a result of its lower IPC and constrained clock frequencies, but it is in range of the Bristol Ridge A10-9700 with its Excavator cores. Socket AM4 soldiers on, though, with much better performance in successive AMD generations.
Stockfish, an open-source chess engine, is designed to extract the utmost performance from many-core chips by scaling well up to 512 cores. That scalability meshes well with the KX-U6780A's eight-core design, but the four-core Intel i3 models continue to lead by a large margin.
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation loves cores and threads, but clock rates obviously play a role. That certainly doesn't help the eight-core KX-U6780A as it falls to beat all but the A10-9700. Even the dual-core quad-thread Athlon 200GE pulls ahead by an impressive 24%, though it's obvious this class of processor isn't the best fit for such a heavily-threaded workload.
Civilization VI Graphics Test
Civilization VI is known for its preference for high clock rates, so it's no surprise to find the Zhaoxin chip grappling with Bristol Ridge yet again. We do see the slightest of gains when we switch from DDR4-2133 to DDR4-2666, so the step up to DDR4-3200 could provide a bit more performance in the future. We wouldn't expect miracles, though.
Dawn of War III
The Warhammer 40,000 benchmark responds well to threading, but it's clear that Intel's clock speed and IPC advantage has an impact as the 8th- and 9th-gen chips take a solid lead. That isn't to discount the Ryzen 3 3200G, though, which musters a solid result given its price point. The Zhaoxin chip trails significantly.
Far Cry 5
Far Cry 5 tells a now-familiar tale, with the pecking order remaining largely similar throughout the remainder of our tests.
Final Fantasy XV
We run this test with the standard quality preset to sidestep the impact of a bug that causes the game engine to render off-screen objects with the higher-resolution setting. The Zhaoxin chip pulls up above the previous-gen dual-core Pentium G4560 by 4.9 fps, notching a much-needed win against an Intel chip. Those wins won't come often, though.
Hitman 2
We experienced significant hitching during the Hitman 2 sequence with the Zhaoxin processor, but the A10-9700 also provided lackluster performance.
Project Cars 2
Although Project CARS 2 is purportedly optimized for threading, clock rates obviously affect this title's frame rates. It's pretty clear that the KX-U6780A yields similar performance to the A10-9700 in most games.
World of Tanks enCore
The World of Tanks benchmark doesn't hold any surprises, with the KX-U6780A again trailing the test pool.
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