A purported Intel Core i9-13900K qualification sample (QS) processor has flexed its muscles in a handful of PC games in a video review. The flagship Raptor Lake chip poses to be one of the best CPUs. The game selection offered a basic overview but still managed to span the most popular genres and gaming styles today. With this tier of processors and a top graphics card, gamers will probably want to play at max quality settings. In such situations, the new Raptor Lake QS chip is only about 3 – 6% faster than its Alder Lake predecessor. Beware, though, that this is a qualification sample, and it seems to have relatively high peak power consumption.
The first genuine video review of an Intel Core i9-13900K QS processor surfaced A few days ago. It concentrated on synthetic and app benchmarks against an Intel Core i9-12900KF (the iGPU-less variant of the Core i9-12900K) on the same platform. It was an important moment in the lineage of leaks that have been uncovering the Raptor Lake flagship chip bit-by-bit for several weeks. The key takeaway was that the next-gen flagship offered an average 10% performance uplift in single-threaded workloads and 35% in multi-threaded workloads.
Today, the same Bilibili-resident TechTuber, Extreme Player, has followed up with a gaming-centric review. Twitter tech detective Harukaze5791 has taken the whole batch of results from the video to provide a clearer and condensed overview of the performance comparisons across the entire gamut of games (rather than tabulating games individually).
A significant change from Extreme Player’s synthetic/app testing was using a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti to let the processors work at their fullest potential. Other than that, the specs were the same as in the last video.
As well as providing the gaming performance benchmarks, Extreme Player charted some interesting peak power consumption stats. The Core i9-13900K chip sometimes ate considerably more power than its Alder Lake predecessor. The games with the most significant inter-generational peak power consumption differential didn’t tally with the games that gained the most fps from using the newer CPU. For example, Horizon Zero Dawn gaming showed very few performance benefits from the 13th Gen Intel Core processor advances. Still, peak power consumption across all three tested resolutions was at least 28% greater.
These are exciting results for PC gamers to mull over. Nonetheless, it is essential to remember a few things; this is a purported QS testing processor, and the results are questionable. The only 13th Gen Core processor enabling BIOS Asus (or MSI) provides right now is labeled as “for boot only and is not suitable for performance testing.”
