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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mode_13h - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
"The new instruction cache on Gracemont is actually very unique. x86 instruction encoding is all over the place and in the worst (and very rare) case can be as long as 15 bytes long. Pre-decoding an instruction is a costly linear operation and you can’t seek the next instruction before determining the length of the prior one. Gracemont, like Tremont, does not have a micro-op cache like the big cores do, so instructions do have to be decoded each time they are fetched. To assist that process, Gracemont introduced a new on-demand instruction length decoder or OD-ILD for short. The OD-ILD generates pre-decode information which is stored alongside the instruction cache. This allows instructions fetched from the L1$ for the second time to bypass the usual pre-decode stage and save on cycles and power."Source: https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/6102/intels-gracemo... Reply
Sailor23M - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
Interesting to see Ryzen 5 7600X perform so well in excel/ppt benchmarks. Why is that so? ReplyMakste - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
Thank you for the review. So Intel too, is finally throwing more cores and increasing frequencies to the problem these days, which increases heat and power usage in turn. AMD too, is a culprit of this practice but has not gone to these lengths as Intel. 16 cores versus supposedly efficiency cores. What is not happening? Replyricebunny - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
It would be a good idea to highlight that the MT Spec benchmarks are just N instantiations of the single thread test. They are not indicative of parallel computing application performance. There are a few dedicated SPEC benchmarks for parallel performance but for some reason they are never included in Anandtechs benchmarks. ReplyRyan Smith - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
"There are a few dedicated SPEC benchmarks for parallel performance but for some reason they are never included in Anandtechs benchmarks."They're not part of the actual SPEC CPU suite. I'm assuming you're talking about the SPEC Workstation benchmarks, which are system-level benchmarks and a whole other kettle of fish.
With SPEC, we're primarily after a holistic look at the CPU architecture, and in the rate-N workloads, whether there's enough memory bandwidth and other resources to keep the CPU cores fed. Reply
wolfesteinabhi - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
its strange to me that when we are talking about value ...especially for budget constraint buyers ... who are also willing to let go of bleeding edge/performance ... we dont even mention AM4 platform.AM4 is still good ..if not great (not to say mature/stable) platform for many ..and you can still buy a lot of reasonably price good procs including 5800X3D ...and users have still chance to upgrade it upto 5950X if they need more cpu at a later date. Reply
cowymtber - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
Burning hot POS. ReplyBernieW - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
Disappointed that you didn't spend more time investigating the serious regression for the 13900K vs the 12900K in the 502.gc_r test. The single threaded test does not have the same regression so it's a curious result that could indicate something wrong with the test setup. Alternately, perhaps the 13900K was throttling during that part of the test or maybe E cores are really not good at compiling code. ReplyAvalon - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
I had that same thought. Why publish something so obviously anomalous and not even say anything about it? Did you try re-testing it? Did you accidentally flip the scores between the 12th and 13th gen? There's no obvious reason this should be happening given the few changes between 12th and 13th gen cores. ReplyRyan Smith - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
"Disappointed that you didn't spend more time investigating the serious regression for the 13900K vs the 12900K in the 502.gc_r test."We still are. That was flagged earlier this week, and re-runs have produced the same results.
So at this point we're digging into matters a bit more trying to figure out what is going on, as the cause is non-obvious. I'm thinking it may be a thread director hiccup or an issue with the ratio of P and E cores, but there's a lot of different (and weird) ways this could go. Reply