How else would you like to compare CPUs? The reason they put them on low settings like that is that so that the games are CPU instead of GPU limited because otherwise you don't see differences between the framerates.
Also, it can still be be very relevant for people that game at 120 FPS or games that are way more CPU limited. It doesn't matter when a CPU runs a game at 240 instead of 200 FPS, but you have an indication of how much better it performs and get an idea how much better it would be in whatever is your use-case for the CPU.
I want them to benchmark CPUs in scenarios that are realistic for the people who are thinking about purchasing them. If that scenario happens to show no appreciable difference, that is a good thing for people to know. Telling the reader that a product is not worth buying is arguably the most important information you can give them. Unfortunately most people reading that review are hoping that the new tech will be awesome, so there is this perverse incentive for review sites to try to demonstrate the biggest differences they possibly can.
Rather than caring about informing the reader's decision about whether or not to purchase in a meaningful way, these sites get it in their head that they need to come up with a scenario that shows a difference between the products they are reviewing because otherwise the readers will not bother clicking in the future. Who wants to read a review of a CPU when it just says that it performs nearly identically the every CPU from the last 5 years? This is also why you see more and more video encoding benchmarks showing up in reviews, because they are one of the few applications that will keep showing noticeable performance improvements year-over-year.
Well of course they would be excited about such FPS increase in Quake when running into CPU bound situations because it shows that CPU tech has improved. It's the point all of these benches, to test if CPU tech has actually advanced and by how much. We aren't here to bench TitanX.
Do you ever wonder why sites don't benchmark how these CPUs perform when running on Mars? That higher temperature would probably skew the results, don't you think?
I'm not trying to be flippant; I'm just trying to demonstrate the point that just because we can come up with a benchmarking scenario that shows a difference doesn't mean that it is a useful one to focus on, unless of course you are writing for marsgamer.com.
To me, CPU tech is really only improving when it is getting better at doing the things its audience actually does already or would like to do. I do acknowledge there is some grey area here, where it may be useful to try to predict how a product might perform in some future scenario that is not here yet, but personally I just don't see those benchmarks you posted as providing any useful insight in that way. If anything, it seems like the trend might be toward less reliance on the CPU if DX12 actually provides any of the benefit that is claimed.
First people complain and moan how Skylake didn't give 15+% FPS increase in GPU limited normal gaming situations, but when it's shown that Skylake actually gives noticeable performance increase in CPU bound situations even that isn't good enough? Maybe I should dug up some benches for previous Intel generations and see if there has been noticeable FPS gains in GPU limited gaming from upgrading CPU.
The problem there is that people are not well-informed on the fact that games are mostly GPU-bound. The appropriate solution is not to trick them into thinking that games are usually CPU-bound by coming up with some contrived scenario that does not reflect the real world.
Honestly, how big is the audience of people who own a monitor that does > 120 Hz, want to play at > 120 fps in 1080p rather than going to a higher resolution, and also own/want a K processor but don't want to overclock it? Less than 1%?
It might not have been so egregious if Eurogamer had spent more time showing the more realistic scenarios where the game is GPU bound before saying "by the way, if you are in this extremely niche audience, then it would help you". Yet it was the only comparison they did in the entire review. If that was the only review you read, you would come out completely misinformed.
