The Intel 9th Gen Review: Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K and Core i5-9600K Tested

Gaming: World of Tanks enCore

Albeit different to most of the other commonly played MMO or massively multiplayer online games, World of Tanks is set in the mid-20th century and allows players to take control of a range of military based armored vehicles. World of Tanks (WoT) is developed and published by Wargaming who are based in Belarus, with the game’s soundtrack being primarily composed by Belarusian composer Sergey Khmelevsky. The game offers multiple entry points including a free-to-play element as well as allowing players to pay a fee to open up more features. One of the most interesting things about this tank based MMO is that it achieved eSports status when it debuted at the World Cyber Games back in 2012.

World of Tanks enCore is a demo application for a new and unreleased graphics engine penned by the Wargaming development team. Over time the new core engine will implemented into the full game upgrading the games visuals with key elements such as improved water, flora, shadows, lighting as well as other objects such as buildings. The World of Tanks enCore demo app not only offers up insight into the impending game engine changes, but allows users to check system performance to see if the new engine run optimally on their system.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

World of Tanks enCore	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

Being a game that’s not especially GPU limited – at least not at Low image quality settings – World of Tanks gives the 9900K some room to stretch its legs. The game isn’t especially sensitive to core counts, so it’s all about high per-thread performance. And in this case the 9900K with its 5.0GHz turbo speed pulls ahead. In fact I’m surprised by just how far ahead of the 8086K it is (16%); this may be one of the big payoffs from the 9900K being able to turbo to 5.0GHz on two cores, versus a single core on the 8086K.

The 9700K also puts up a strong showing in this situation, second only to the 9900K. We have a few theories on this – including whether the lack of hyper-threading plays a benefit – but it’s none the less notable that the new CFL-R CPUs are taking the top two spots.

The flip side however is that any CPU-based performance lead melts away with higher image quality settings. By the time we reach High quality, it’s purely GPU bottlenecked.