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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
169 Comments
View All Comments
adenta180 - Friday, June 23, 2023 - link
Did you guys ever get to the bottom of this SPECint rate GCC regression on 13900K? ReplyAvalon - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
I think it's starting to become a little disingenuous to list the default TDP in the benchmarks, when it's become increasingly obvious over the past few generations that Intel chips run nowhere in the stratosphere of those TDPs.When you see a "125W" $589 chip virtually tied with a "170W" $699 chip it makes it seem like Intel is a no brainer. Might be time to start putting actual power draw in each of the tests in there, or simply leave stock TDP out, because listing a Core i9 at "125W" when it's running 50-100W higher than an equivalent AMD chip doesn't make much sense any longer. Reply
WannaBeOCer - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
Did you even read the article? Intel advertises the 13900k as a 253w chip. It drew 32% more than it advertised while AMD advertises its 7950x as a 170w and it drew 30% more than they advertised. On all of Intel’s slides“Processor Base Power
125 W
Maximum Turbo Power
253 W” Reply
bcortens - Saturday, October 22, 2022 - link
Doesn’t matter if they advertise it. The charts are misleading because the W number at the left of the chart has nothing to do with the power consumed to get the performance indicated in the chart.They should really just leave the W number off or show a measured average W required to complete the test. Then the number would have meaning. As it stands, for the purposes of the graph, the number doesn’t mean much. Reply
Avalon - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
And, to be fair to Intel, why are some of the IGP gaming benchmarks only showing the 12th and 13th gen Intel vs AMD APUs? There's really nothing to be gleaned from this; of course APUs will be faster in IGP tests. If you can't do like for like, then either just publish the Intel scores or don't publish at all. ReplyIketh - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
In your closing comments about power consumption, I was reminded about the AMD article that compared the performance difference between 230W and 65W. I think you should also mention that in this article. I'm holding out for AMD mobile parts. Those laptops will be nice. ReplyIketh - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
125W on Intel 7 process, when it's actually 325W on 10nm lmao... pure marketing ReplyWannaBeOCer - Friday, October 21, 2022 - link
Did you even read the article? Intel advertises the 13900k as a 253w chip. It drew 32% more than it advertised while AMD advertises its 7950x as a 170w and it drew 30% more than they advertised. On all of Intel’s slides“Processor Base Power
125 W
Maximum Turbo Power
253 W” Reply
bcortens - Saturday, October 22, 2022 - link
Reviews shouldn’t care about the advertised power, or what it says in the bios when you set the “limit” to 65 watts, reviews should actually measure and report the real power draw.We don’t read reviews to read intel and amd marketing numbers, we want to know the real numbers for a given workload Reply
Iketh - Sunday, October 23, 2022 - link
what on earth does that have to do with my statement Reply