Intel NUC8i7HVK (Hades Canyon) Gaming Performance - A Second Look
by Ganesh T S on May 14, 2018 8:01 AM ESTGaming Performance - Civilization VI
The Civilization series of turn-based strategy games is very popular. For such games, the frame rate is not necessarily an important factor in the gaming experience. However, with Civilization VI, Firaxis has cranked up the visual fidelity to make the game more attractive. As a result, the game can be taxing on the GPU as well as the CPU, particularly in the DirectX 12 mode.
As part of our gaming system reviews, we run the built-in benchmark at two different resolutions (1080p and 2160p), and with two different quality settings (medium and ultra).
| Civilization VI (DirectX 12) Performance | |||
The relative performance numbers across all tested resolutions and quality settings are as expected, with the Hades Canyon NUC managing to comfortably be better than the Skull Canyon NUC with its integrated graphics, but, unable to match the systems equipped with GTX 1060 and better GPUs. That said, users should be able to comfortably play the game at 1080p with medium quality settings in the Hades Canyon NUC.
The differences between the two quality settings are summarized in the table below.
| Civilization VI (DX12) - Evaluated Quality Settings | ||
| Aspect | Medium | Ultra |
| MSAA Sample Count | 4x | 8x |
| Shadow Map Resolution | 4096 x 4096 | 8192 x 8192 |
| Ambient Occlusion Depth Map Resolution | 1024 x 1024 | 2048 x 2048 |
| Ambient Occlusion Render Texture Resolution | 1024 x 1024 | 2048 x 2048 |
| Terrain Synthesis Detail Level | Low Resolution | Full Resolution |
| Terrain Quality Level | 3 | 4 |
| Low Quality Terrain and Water Shaders | Yes | No |
| Screen-Space Reflection Passes | 2 | 4 |
| Video Effects Detail Level | Low | High |
| Clutter Detail Level | Not a Lot | A Lot |
| Ambient Occlusion | Disabled | Enabled |
| Leader Rendering Quality Level | 1 | 3 |
| Motion Blur for Leaders | Disabled | Enabled |
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eva02langley - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Well, I think AMD might have wanted to keep their Vega trump card for their own APUs, which I believe is the right thing to do from business standpoint.Anyway, another Intel attempt that comes short of anything except just a proof of concept.
sing_electric - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
If that's the case, then we haven't seen AMD's solution here.Intel's "G" chips with Vega graphics have HBM2 memory on-package, while AMD's APUs just use system memory. That certainly has cost (and power) advantages, but it also means the APUs don't perform nearly this well, even under ideal circumstances. (On top of that, it looks like a lot of OEMs are using single-channel DDR, and sometimes not even at a high frequency, on their Ryzen APU systems, which
sing_electric - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
*REALLY kills performance.only1jv - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Will there be a review of the DeskMini GTX 1080? I know this article mentions the GTX1060 model but why not the GTX1080?Now I'm really curious to know how the ASRock GTX1080 would stack up against the Zotac ZBOX EN1080K
darkos - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
why are there no flight simulation tests included? eg: prepar3d or fsx or x-plane ?s3cur3 - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
If an X-Plane benchmark is something the Anandtech editorial team would be interested in, you can contact me via the email in my profile. The numbers might be more useful after our transition to Vulkan, though.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Our website accounts don't have profiles - can you ping ian@anandtech.com. I'd like to see what we can do.bernstein - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
interesting product! finally a performance competitive SoC gaming (or 3d work) rig from intel!! just imagine the possibilities if they used coffee lake + vega 64!however the a price/performance ratio on gpu limited tasks :
- compared to a Shuttle XPC Gaming Cube is abysmal
- compared to a Skull Canyon NUC is phenomenal
so while expensive, it's certainly less overpriced than previous intel gaming NUC offerings...
kmmatney - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Looks like similar performance to a GTX 1050? or 1050 Ti? Would have been nice to include one of those cards.Yojimbo - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
The difference between the 1050 Ti and the 1060 is quite large. This Intel chip with AMD graphics has a performance between them, but closer to the 1060 than a 1050 Ti, on average. Of course one would have to look closely at one's use case to decide whether it will run closer to a 1060 or to a 1050 Ti.