Intel’s Core i9-14900K is the flagship CPU of the supposedly upcoming Raptor Lake Refresh range, and we just spotted a leaked slide detailing the processor’s gaming performance.
The slide shared by HXL on
Intel official 14900K vs 7950X3D gaming performance slides. + Metro ExodusStarfieldTotal War: WARHAMMERAshes of the SingularityCS: GO-Dota2FortniteCyberpunk 2077League of LegendsHorizon Zero Dawn pic.twitter.com/N6v78zA2C4October 10, 2023
It compares the Core i9-14900K against AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X3D, so it’s a battle of the flagships across a whole range of PC games, of which there are 25 in total. Intel has selected a resolution of 1080p at high details to ensure that the processor is taxed as much as possible (at higher resolutions the GPU steps in to carry a greater share of the workload).
As for the winner, it’s the 14900K that comes out on top in 14 of the gaming benchmarks, with the 7950X3D triumphing in 10 – the remaining game is a draw with both CPUs offering equal frame rates.
The big wins for Intel included Metro Exodus and Starfield, both of which showed 23% better performance than AMD’s flagship.
Total War: Warhammer was a similarly impressive 22% win for Intel, with Ashes of The Singularity up 15% and CS:GO up 14%. Other wins were slightly more modest (single digits) affairs for Intel, and AMD, as noted, took the crown in quite a few games, albeit only by a fair distance in a trio of titles. These were Cyberpunk 2077 (where the Intel CPU was 89% as fast as the 7950X3D), Fortnite (82%) and DOTA 2 (77%).
The overall result was that Intel’s Core i9-14900K was 2.5% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D.
Analysis: If we talk about gaming, what about the 7800X3D?
A 2.5% margin doesn’t sound like much, but it’s certainly a win for Intel, in terms of being faster in a greater number of games, and also getting more of those bigger wins. Depending on the game you’re playing – as always – the difference can be quite significant, and you’re more likely to see significantly better performance with the flagship processor Raptor Lake Refresh. If these results hold up more broadly, there will of course be a time for review and release.
Of course there are some comments to be made here. The first is that, as always with these types of marketing slides, we must proceed with some caution. Bias in choosing gaming benchmarks is inevitable – at any company, not just Intel – but to be fair to Team Blue it seems like a fair comparison overall (AMD has some wins after all, so it’s not like Intel dumps every game in which Team Red did well).
We also do not know the configuration of the test PCs used, which could affect the results.
Next, while the comparison between two top CPUs is clearly valid in terms of pitting one flagship against the other, for gamers there is a wrinkle here, and it’s called the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
Purely for gaming performance, the 7800X3D is (mostly) very close to the 7950X3D, and due to the latter’s design (two CCDs, one with 3D V-Cache, one without), there are even some issues where certain games may lag a bit. be slower with the 7950X3D. (These can be largely circumvented, but it is a bit of extra hassle).
The overall point is that the 7800X3D is in many ways as attractive an option as the 7950X3D for gamers, and price-wise the 14900K won’t even remotely compete in a head-to-head gaming battle with that CPU. Yes, there will certainly be benefits to the Intel chip outside of gaming, so it depends on your own personal use case – that goes for the 7950X3D as well – but for gaming alone, the 7800X3D is a tough customer to beat. Especially at the prices it has been reduced lately, which honestly represent ridiculously good value.
The other thing to mention here is that we expect the 14900K to be a bit of a power guzzler, at least if the rumors are true. While Raptor Lake Refresh heralds efficiency gains over Raptor Lake, the theory is that Intel has more than spent these advances pushing the clocks to achieve a fast enough performance boost from generation to generation.
So while there are some potential issues here, this Intel leak paints a more compelling picture for the 14900K than we expected in gaming. For those who aren’t just purely interested in gaming, the flagship Raptor Lake Refresh could be an attractive option that has the raw grunt to handle tough tasks well, and also delivers excellent gaming performance.
What will also be very interesting is to see the 14700K, as this is the only 14th generation CPU that is said to have more cores added to it, so it could be a very tempting upgrade to the 13700K, of which should It should be noted that this one is currently at the top of our list. list of best processors. Naturally, prices for the 14700K, and the 14900K along with other Raptor Lake Refresh chips, will be key to how they compare to Intel’s previous generation and AMD’s lineup.