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3DMark
3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.
3DMark is one of the only 3D applications where overall score scales in line with CPU processing power. This is due to the fact the Physics portion of the test contributes directly towards the final score and the Physics test is a function of multi-threaded CPU capability. As such the i7 6950X easily tops the chart but as we'll see this doesn't necessarily play out in real world gaming.
Ashes of the Singularity
Ashes of the Singularity shows a narrow FPS range of 45.7 to 46.6 across all CPUs in stock or overclocked results. That's just 0.9 FPS to separate all CPUs which implicates that it's a heavily GPU-bound game, at least at this resolution and detail level.
Grand Theft Auto V
GTA V showed a wider variety of results, 78.3 to 85.3 FPS which is a variation 7 frames per second. GTA V seems to benefit from a mixture of better IPC and higher frequency, but doesn't seem to make much use of more than 4 cores, so it's not surprising Intel's mainstream i7 6700K comes out on top. The i7 6950X performs well when stock or overclocked but having 10 cores doesn't yield much advantage here, as you might have expected.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Shadow of Mordor delivered consistent results for all CPUs that are within margin of error, with exception to the i7 5960X which, for some reason, edged all other CPUs out by a margin of 2-3 FPS.
It seems for gaming that the extra cores and total processing power of the i7 6950X are not fully utilised. The mainstream platform is equally as good if not slightly better and much more cost effective. That is, at least, until most games start to favour more than 4-6 cores and rely less on frequency, if they ever do.
