The Intel 9th Gen Review: Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K and Core i5-9600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on October 19, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Coffee Lake
- 14++
- Core 9th Gen
- Core-S
- i9-9900K
- i7-9700K
- i5-9600K
Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Ashes: Classic | RTS | Mar 2016 |
DX12 | 720p Standard |
1080p Standard |
1440p Standard |
4K Standard |
|
Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Ashes Classic | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
As a game that was designed from the get-go to punish CPUs and showcase the benefits of DirectX 12-style APIs, Ashes is one of our more CPU-sensitive tests. Above 1080p results still start running together due to GPU limits, but at or below that, we get some useful separation. In which case what we see is that the 9900K ekes out a small advantage, putting it in the lead and with the 9700K right behind it.
Notably, the game doesn’t scale much from 1080p down to 720p. Which leads me to suspect that we’re looking at a relatively pure CPU bottleneck, a rarity in modern games. In which case it’s both good and bad for Intel’s latest CPU; it’s definitely the fastest thing here, but it doesn’t do much to separate itself from the likes of the 8700K, holding just a 4% advantage at 1080p. This being despite its frequency and core count advantage. So assuming this is not in fact a GPU limit, then it means we may be encroaching on another bottleneck (memory bandwidth?), or maybe the practical frequency gains on the 9900K just aren’t all that much here.
But if nothing else, the 9900K and even the 9700K do make a case for themselves here versus the 9600K. Whether it’s the core or the clockspeeds, there’s a 10% advantage for the faster processors at 1080p.
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muziqaz - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
I love the price of $488 stamped all over each of the test results, while over here in UK I see price of £599 and newegg quotes $580. Even your linked amazon has it at $580. And conclusion is awesome with: "At $488 SEP, plus a bit more for 'on-shelf price'..." Since when is extra 100 bucks a bit more? :Dcompudaze - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
What was the actual vcore for your overclocks?HardwareDufus - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
I7-9700k.... an I7 that isn't hyperthreaded.... let's totally muddy the waters now Intel.... Guess they had to save some feature for the I9's $100+ surcharge...… Good grief.bogda - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
How pointless is reviewers comment: "... World of Tanks gives the 9900K some room to stretch its legs..."?Difference between two chips in discussion is between 712fps and 681fps! Not even Neo from Matrix could note the difference.
How pointless is discussing top of the line CPU gaming performance in 720p in any game??
How pointless is marketing 8C/16T CPU for gamers???
sseyler - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
Not sure whether this has been pointed out yet, but the Threadripper prices need to be updated. For example, the 1920X is now well under $500 as advertised even on AMD's website and the 1900X goes for $350 on Newegg.dlum - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
For me, listing the long-obsolete prices for AMD processors (still initial, long-outdated MSRP for 1920x $799 - whereas a simple amazon search confirms it's now for just over half of that ($431)) is clearly disrespectful and shamefull practice for a reviewer.It's very sad such dishonest practices found their way to Anandtech and they are so prominent here.
Probably that's also why no one answers nor fixes those clearly misleading figures.
(Maybe that's the cost of being able to read such anyway valuable reviews for free :)
sseyler - Thursday, October 25, 2018 - link
Well, to be fair, I'm sure the editors didn't dig this deeply through the comments. They're busy people.Also, I think I heard something mentioned before about their graphs having some semi-automatic mechanism for listing prices and the like. I don't remember exactly, but it probably has something to do with pulling MSRP data and it's difficult to change given the way the templated graphs are generated from the benchmarks.
I imagine it was done something like this for consistency across the site as well as not biasing prices according to specific vendors. Given the first reason, I don't know why it'd be difficult for individual editors to customize/tweak certain aspects, but maybe that needs to be revised to be more flexible. As for the second reason, there are clearly reasonable solutions, like finding the *current* MSRP (rather than the release MSRP), or selecting the lowest/median/average price among a pool of selected retailers.
Anyway, it doesn't make much sense to me to characterize this as an instance of dishonesty, but rather a technical detail that's important enough to invest the time in it's improvement.
sseyler - Thursday, October 25, 2018 - link
its*zodiacfml - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Meh. Intel owner could simply delidd and approach these kinds of performance.Resolution above 1080p, AMDs parts have better value.
zodiacfml - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Made the comment without reading the review. The difference is a lot smaller than I expected where the only useful difference is in Ashes where AMD usually dominates due to sheer core count.I'd be fine with that 6 core CPU from AMD.