Intel Core i9-13900K and i5-13600K Review: Raptor Lake Brings More Bite
by Gavin Bonshor on October 20, 2022 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance: 720p And Lower
The reason we test games in CPU reviews at lower resolutions such as 720p and below is simple; titles are more likely to be CPU bound than they are GPU bound at lower resolutions. This means there are more frames for the processor to process as opposed to the graphics card doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
There are some variances where some games will still use graphical power, but not as much CPU grunt at these smaller resolutions, and this is where we can show where CPU limitations lie in terms of gaming.
We are using DDR5 memory on the Core i9-13900K, the Core i5-13600K, the Ryzen 9 7950X, and Ryzen 5 7600X, as well as Intel's 12th Gen (Alder Lake) processors at the following settings:
- DDR5-5600B CL46 - Intel 13th Gen
- DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
- DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 12th Gen
All other CPUs such as Ryzen 5000 and 3000 were tested at the relevant JEDEC settings as per the processor's individual memory support with DDR4.
Civilization VI
World of Tanks
Borderlands 3
Grand Theft Auto V
Red Dead Redemption 2
F1 2022
Hitman 3
Total War: Warhammer 3
Cyberpunk 2077
Digesting our results at 720p (and lower) resolutions, we can see that things are quite competitive at the top end, especially with the Core i9-13900K and the Core i9-12900KS across most of the games. Some of the games from our testing look to benefit from a different variable, whether that is core count, quality of cores versus core count and frequency; L3 cache size, or a mixture of all three.
In World of Tanks, the majority of the field of processors on test look to be within a certain margin depending on frequency, IPC, and core count. The Ryzen 9 7950X does well here, although the latest Raptor Lake chips seem to be hovering around the levels of performance as the previous 12th Gen Core chips. In Civ VI, the latest AMD Ryzen 7000 and their Zen 4 cores dominate the field, while the 5800X3D and R9 5950X are also competitive. Behind these come the Intel chips with the Core i9-13900K performing the best of those.
Overall, it's a bit of a mixed bag at 720/480p in terms of performance. There are cases where Raptor Lake performs well, but equally, the same can be said for the Ryzen 7000 chips. But ultimately, none of the top chips here have a 95th percentile frame rate lower than 170fps in any action game, while the more unique Civlization 6 never drops 114fps. Which is to say that these high-end CPUs aren't likely to be a gaming performance bottleneck any time soon – getting a GPU that can keep up at higher resolutions is going to be the harder task.
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nandnandnand - Thursday, October 20, 2022 - link
The 7950X outperforms the 13900K from 65W to 185W by substantial amounts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P40gp_DJk5E (19:00, Cinebench R23 multi)It also seems to use less power at lower temps in gaming (23:00, Cyberpunk 2077)
That's probably not the end of the story, but Zen 4 is clearly doing better out of the box. Good news for Dragon Range buyers in 2023. Reply
Harry_Wild - Thursday, October 20, 2022 - link
Very happy that Raptor Lake is super competitive to AMD 7000 series! AMD has to lower it’s high end pricing now for both it’s chipset and retail pricing. Let the price wars begin after Thanksgivings. I expect the 7050X to go from $699 to $499. X670E boards will be the same price as the Intel equivalent models! 😁👍 ReplyDrazick - Thursday, October 20, 2022 - link
Could you build / compiler the SPEC tests with AVX512 flags for the Ryzen 7xxx? ReplyRyan Smith - Thursday, October 20, 2022 - link
It's on the to-do list. Though we're not expecting a significant change in performance. ReplyKangal - Thursday, October 20, 2022 - link
Any plans to test these in thermally or energy-constrained limits? Like with Air Cooling, or certain Watt limits?Or perhaps, how will Zen4 on laptops compare to Intel's RPL-equivalent on laptops...?
From here it looks similar to Zen3 vs Intel 12th, or Zen2 vs Intel 11th. That AMD is competitive in multithread and better efficiency, and Intel only remains competitive by expending alot of power, and it's mostly for the single-core.
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Ryan Smith - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
Yes. Performance testing at lower power levels is also on the to-do list. We had a chance to play with eco mode a bit for the Ryzen review, but didn't get to do something similar for Raptor Lake. ReplyKangal - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
Oh nice, will be waiting for that next article to drop. Cheers!Reply
m53 - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
@Ryan: How about testing idle power and realistic day-to-day use cases? I can only find this kind of review for 12th gen vs Zen3 and not 13th gen vs zen4. Would be really nice to have the numbers for 13th zen vs zen4.Here is a link to the review for 12th gen vs zen3: https://youtu.be/4F2z3F64o94 Reply
Drazick - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
@Ryan, I am not sure about it.I think enabling AVX512 on Ryzen will have a great effect on the FP tests of SPEC. Reply
Oxford Guy - Friday, October 28, 2022 - link
There wasn’t a delay when one of the rendering apps got AVX-512 support several years ago. Reply