Intel Rocket Lake (14nm) Review: Core i9-11900K, Core i7-11700K, and Core i5-11600K
by Dr. Ian Cutress on March 30, 2021 10:03 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- LGA1200
- 11th Gen
- Rocket Lake
- Z590
- B560
- Core i9-11900K
Gaming Tests: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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GeoffreyA - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
It could be due to x264 limiting the number of threads because when vertical resolution divided by threads drops below a certain threshold---I think round about 30 or 40---quality begins to suffer.GeoffreyA - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
I tested this now on FFmpeg but it should be the same on Handbrake because the x264/5 libraries are doing the actual encoding.I only have a 4C/4T CPU but used the "-threads" switch to request more. On x264, regardless of resolution, once more than 16 threads are asked for, it logs a warning that it's not recommended but goes ahead and uses the requested count, up to 128. I assume that running at default settings, like AT is probably doing with Handbrake, will let x264 cut off at 16 by itself. If someone could confirm this with a 32-thread CPU, that would be nice. As for x265, I gave it a try as well and the encoder refuses to go on if more than 16 threads are requested, saying the range must be between 0 and X265_MAX_FRAME_THREADS.
In short, I reckon both these codecs are cutting off at 16 threads on default settings. If Ian or someone else could test how much extra is gained by manually putting in the count on a 32T CPU, that would be interesting.
scott_htpc - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
Splat. Backporting doesn't really work & dead-end platform.What I'd really like to read is a detailed narrative of Intel's blunders over the last 5-10 years. To me, it probably makes a case study in failed leadership & hubris, but I would really like to read an authoritative, detailed account. I'm curious why the risks of their decisions were not enough to dissuade them to take a better path forward.
Prosthetic Head - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
Yes, some sort of post mortem on Intel development over the last few years would be interesting. Once they abandoned the Pentium 4 madness, they did a good job with Core, Core2 and then the early stages of the 'i' series. Because AMD were by that point down their own dead end, they had essentially no competition for about a decade. The tempting easy explanation is that as a de facto monopoly for desktop and laptop CPUs, they only innovated enough to keep the upgrade cycle ticking over, then when AMD made a rapid comeback they got caught with their pants down and some genuine technical difficulties in fab tech.... But the reality could be a lot more complex and interesting than that.Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
> But the reality could be a lot more complex and interesting than that.The reality is Conroe was a once-in-a-lifetime IPC improvement, literally 90% better (or nearly double the performance!) clock-for-clock than the ill-fated Pentium 4 (see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/m7ocxj/pen... They are not going to get that again unless Gelsinger clones himself across Intel's entire leadership team. Now, they may get something Zen-like in the ~50% range, but nothing Conroe-like unless ALL the stars align after a decade of complacency.
Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/m7ocxj/pen...29a - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
Keep in mind that P4 was a piece of shit built for marketing high clock speeds and was easily beaten by Athlon 64 running 1Ghz slower so getting that much IPC wasn't as hard as usual.GeoffreyA - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
"Keep in mind that P4 was a piece of"Not to defend the P4, but Northwood wasn't half bad in the Athlon XP's time, beating it quite a lot. It was Prescott that mucked it all up.
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
TBF, the only reason it wasnt half bad is AMD's willingness to just abandon XP. I mean, only 2.23 GHz? 3 GHz OCs were not hard to do with their mobile lineup, and those obliterated anything intel would have until conroe. IF they had released 2.4, 2.6, and 2.8 GHz athlon XPs intel would have been losing every benchmark against them.GeoffreyA - Friday, April 2, 2021 - link
Oh yes, the XP had the higher IPC and would have given Intel a sound drubbing if its clocks were only higher. Thankfully, the Athlon 64 came and turned the tables round. I remember in those days my heart was set on the 3200+ Barton but I ended up with a K8 budget system of sorts.