Intel’s flagship CPU Raptor Lake has seen a few other benchmarks leaked, and unlike the previous spill, this is a juicier affair because these are real gaming tests.
The game’s benchmarks come from the same source on the Chinese video sharing site bile (opens in new tab) which provided results for CineBench and Geekbench recently, as indicated by @harukaze5719 on Twitter.
i9 12900K vs i9 13900K game comparison. (relative)*NOTE: some high performance is due to radical performance improvement in some games pic.twitter.com/B8GEW9TVIrJuly 17, 2022
Again, this is an engineering sample of the Core i9-13900K processor that is compared to its predecessor, the 12900K, but we have to keep in mind that it is a pre-release chip and also be very careful with any leaked benchmarking, of any kind. manner .
Bearing these caveats in mind, in a selection of games including some popular titles like Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and PUBG, the 13900K ended up being around 5% faster for average framerates at 1080p resolution, around 7% faster at 1440p and 3% better at 4K resolution.
The approximate result of this is around a 5% increase in gaming performance compared to the 12900K, which looks pretty disappointing. Furthermore, the power usage is also considerably increased for this 13900K sample, at least for the peak consumption figures given, which show the Raptor Lake chip hitting 150W to 160W, when the 12900K goes more like 120W to 140W (the numbers vary greatly depending on the game being played, as you would expect).
Analysis: Reasons to be cautious – and there are plenty of them
This isn’t the best look for the incoming 13900K, but we definitely shouldn’t jump to conclusions here. Realistically, we’d expect a bigger boost for a new generation of CPUs than that, and we’ll likely get just that for a variety of reasons.
First of all, as we already mentioned, this is a (supposed) pre-release sample, and the finished main processor will be faster anyway. For starters, in these tests, the 13900K is bumping up to 5.5GHz, and the rumored boost speed for the flagship is more like 5.8GHz or so. And the Raptor Lake platform is obviously not yet fully realized, with, for example, early BIOS versions for Raptor Lake motherboards that are not yet ready for release – also in the works.
The power consumption numbers also look a little off to us, likely pointing to some instability around the engineering sample being run here. Some of the individual benchmark results also look a little strange, with some seriously big increases in performance for minimal framerates here and there.
All of which is to say we wouldn’t be running around panicking about Raptor Lake being a wet squib just yet. Keep in mind that the previously mentioned benchmarking looked quite promising, particularly around multi-core performance, with the chip still in a pre-release incarnation.
Intel has made good progress with the 12th Gen Alder Lake processors, garnering a lot of praise particularly in terms of gaming versus Ryzen, so even a reasonable step forward with this Raptor Lake update still means AMD needs to take something out of the bag. with Ryzen 7000.
Fortunately for Team Red, all the rumors point to the new Zen 4 chips being something special, so the next-gen CPU battle is likely to be a close race; certainly in terms of performance. This new 13th-gen leak also suggests that AMD is more likely to take a firmer lead in terms of the energy efficiency crown, mind, and that could be more important than usual given the state of power bills that are running. getting out of control. for many people, and it should get worse in the future.
