CPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy 2022: Processor Ranking Charts

Our CPU benchmarks performance hierarchy ranks current and previous-gen Intel and AMD processors based on performance, including all of the Best CPUs for Gaming. Below the CPU ranking charts and tables, this guide also gives you a basic introduction to CPU benchmarking and includes a list of commonly-used CPU benchmark utilities.

Your CPU greatly affects overall performance and, to many, is a computer's most important component. CPU benchmark comparisons help us sort out the differences, but when it comes time to buy a CPU for your desktop, you'll find a dizzying collection of model numbers and specs from both Intel and AMD.

We've listed the best CPUs for gaming and best CPUs for workstations in other articles, but if you want to know how each chip stacks up against all the others and how we come to our decisions, this CPU benchmarks hierarchy is for you. If you're looking for a broader view of the current state of the market, head to our AMD vs Intel feature for more CPU comparisons.

AMD also released its Ryzen 7000 processors this week, and we reviewed the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X and have added those chips to the CPU benchmark rankings below. Intel also has its Raptor Lake, which the company says can boost up to 6GHz, due in mid-October. That means the leaders in our CPU benchmarks will change drastically over the coming month.

Keep your eye out for our update with the Ryzen 5 4600G, Ryzen 5 4500, and Ryzen 3 4100 as we fill out the lower-end of the CPU benchmark hierarchy. On the other end of the spectrum, we've added AMD's fire-breathing 64-core 128-thread Threadripper Pro 5995WX to the charts with this latest update, along with the 32-core 64-thread Threadripper Pro 5975WX and 3975WX. These chips provide surprisingly strong performance in gaming, but they're geared specifically for the workstation market. 

If you're looking for the fastest gaming chip on the market across the broadest range of prices, Intel's Alder Lake chips have taken the crown from AMD convincingly. However, AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D takes the title as the fastest gaming CPU on the market and lives up to AMD's claim that 3D V-Cache delivers an explosive increase in gaming performance, but isn't as fast as in other types of work beyond gaming.

We'll explain how we ranked the processors under each table. The game testing ranking is first. We also include an application performance metric, which we've split up into single- and multi-threaded measurements. We also have an integrated graphics CPU benchmark ranking so you can see how AMD's APUs stack up to Intel's lineup.

CPU Benchmarks Rankings 2022 - Windows 11

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Here are the current rankings for the Alder Lake chips compared to the Ryzen 5000 lineup in Windows 11, along with DDR4 vs DDR5 benchmarks and CPU overclock configurations. We also have a broader selection of tests below for Windows 10, so refer to those charts for a greater historical perspective.

We recently added the Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 CPUs to the hierarchy above. We tested the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X with updated software and BIOS revisions, so these results are not directly comparable with our historical data. As such, we have the most important Ryzen and Intel SKUs in the first four charts, and then an additional four charts that have an expanded list of chips. 

CPU Benchmarks Rankings 2022 - Windows 10

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We conducted these tests in Windows 10, which penalizes the 12th-Gen Intel scores. This is because Windows 10 doesn't target threads at the correct cores with the precision that we see in Windows 11 (typically, this doesn't result in much performance loss, and you can use third-party freeware to fix the few issues). You can see the Windows 11 results in the album in the first album in the article.

We rank all the Intel and AMD processors in the tables below, but we don't include CPU overclock performance rankings. You can see all of those numbers in the charts above. We've also added separate charts for integrated graphics testing.

Bear in mind that the charts above use the raw performance numbers, whereas our CPU benchmarks rankings below use a score to rank the chips relative to one another. Admittedly, the charts are getting a bit packed as we expand our rankings pool, but we'll work to separate this out into different classes as our CPU benchmarks database grows. 

Gaming CPU Benchmarks Ranking 2022

*indicates an APU tested with a discrete GPU. Note: These types of processors are geared for performance with integrated graphics - please see individual reviews or our section below for those performance rankings.

We've ranked all the Intel 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, and 7th Gen processors, along with AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper chips from all four generations. We have two rankings for each chip, based on 1080p and 1440p CPU gaming benchmarks. We conducted these tests in Windows 10 for compatibility purposes. You can see how the Windows 11 hierarchy looks in the slide show further above. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it.

There's a notable exception in our charts: The Threadripper Pro 5995WX, 5975WX, and 3975WX have slightly higher performance if we exclude two of the game titles that don't seem to respond well to their architecture (Borderlands 3 and Far Cry 5). We've included those results in this measure to ensure compatibility with our library of results, but the chips score higher with those titles excluded. You can see what that looks like in our AMD Threadripper Pro 5995WX and 5975WX Review.

The chart is aligned in order based on the 1080p game results, but the 1440p listings aren't listed in sequential order due to unfortunate limitations with our tables. Pay attention to the 1440p rankings: Some faster chips at 1440p CPU benchmarks may be listed below slower chips due to the 1080p results. You'll also notice that the 12th-Gen Intel processors, like the 12900K, 12700K and 12600K, have two measurements for each entry — that's to quantify performance with both DDR4 and DDR5 memory, with the former almost always offering better performance in Windows 10.

We measured performance for the 1080p CPU gaming benchmarks with a geometric mean of Borderlands 3, Hitman 2, Far Cry 5, Project CARS 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. We measured performance for the 1440p CPU gaming benchmarks with a geometric mean of Borderlands 3, Project CARS 3, Far Cry 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Integrated GPU Gaming CPU Benchmarks Rankings 2022

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Here's our list of gaming performance with integrated graphics on several of the leading APUs available. We've split this into two different price ranges, so be sure to flip through all of the performance charts. For a bit of commentary and analysis of these results, head to our Ryzen 7 5700G, Ryzen 5 5600G, and Ryzen 3 5300G reviews. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it.

Single-Threaded CPU Benchmarks Rankings 2022

We calculate the above single-threaded CPU benchmarks rankings based on a geometric mean of the Cinebench, POV-Ray, and LAME CPU benchmarks. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it.

We conducted these tests in Windows 10, which penalizes the 12th-Gen Intel scores. This is because Windows 10 doesn't target threads at the correct cores with the precision that we see in Windows 11. You can see the Windows 11 results in the album in the first album in the article, but suffice it to say that Alder Lake chips, like the Core i7-12900K, 12700K and 12600K, lead by large margins in Windows 11.

Single-threaded performance is often tied directly to the responsiveness and snappiness of your PC in any number of daily applications, like loading an operating system or surfing the web. This metric largely depends upon a mixture of instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput (the number of operations the chip can execute in one clock cycle) and frequency, which is the speed at which the transistors switch between on and off states.

However, a whole host of other considerations, such as cache, architecture, and interconnects (like rings, meshes, and infinity fabric) impact this measure of per-core performance, so these results do not align perfectly based upon clock frequency. Instead, performance varies with each application and how well it is tuned for the respective architectures.

Multi-Threaded CPU Benchmarks Rankings 2022

The multi-threaded workload column is based on CPU benchmarks performance in Cinebench, POV-ray, vray, Blender (four tests - Koro, Barcellona, Classroom, bmw27), y-cruncher, and Handbrake x264 and x265 workloads. These CPU benchmarks represent performance in productivity-focused applications that tend to require more compute horsepower. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it.

We conducted these tests in Windows 10, which penalizes the 12th-Gen Intel scores. This is because Windows 10 doesn't target threads at the correct cores with the precision that we see in Windows 11. You can see the Windows 11 results in the album in the first album in the article, but suffice it to say that Alder Lake chips, like the Core i7-12900K, 12700K and 12600K, perform much better in Windows 11.

Like we see with single-threaded performance metrics, multi-threaded performance, which is a measure of a chip's performance in applications that utilize multiple software threads, varies based upon a whole host of architectural factors. It also depends heavily upon how well the software scales with additional compute cores. As such, these results do not align perfectly based upon core/thread count, though it does serve as a decent litmus of multi-threaded performance. 

Be aware that architectures, caches, and interconnects profoundly impact these results, as all of these factors impact how well performance scales with additional threads. Performance rarely scales perfectly with the addition of more cores/threads, so the scaling factor of each processor architecture weighs in heavily on the value proposition of going with a higher core count processor.

How to Benchmark your CPU

Benchmarking your CPU is also an essential practice for CPU overclocking or merely tuning your system. Simply run a CPU benchmark before you make any changes, then re-test after changes to see the results. You can head to our deep-dive details of overclocking in our How to Overclock a CPU guide.

How do you benchmark your CPU? Well, that's not as complicated as you might think. Choosing the best CPU benchmarks can be a daunting task, but the general rule is that the best performance benchmark is simply measuring the performance of the programs you use the most. So naturally, simply due to a lack of comparable test results, these real-world benchmarks might not give you a means of comparing your performance to other CPUs.

However, if the programs you frequently use don't have built-in benchmarks you can also use similar types of programs (renderers or encoders, for instance) as a proxy for your workload. There's also a selection of well-known benchmarks with large databases for easy comparisons. You can also compare your results to the benchmarks you see in our library of reviews to get a good sense of how your system stacks up. We'll list out some great application benchmarks with download links below.

These same theories apply to CPU game benchmarking — the best CPU benchmark is the game that you play the most. You can download an fps counter, like FRAPS, to measure performance during your gaming session. Games can vary widely, so we don't have a specific list of titles to test, but you can simply use the gaming CPU benchmarks you see in our reviews as a good starting point.

You can also use synthetic gaming CPU benchmarks, a few of which we have listed below. Just be aware that these synthetic CPU benchmarks don't tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but they do show us the raw amount of compute power exposed to game engines. However, given their stability and repeatability, these are great benchmarks for comparing performance before and after any changes you may make to your system. 

Most often overlook web-browser performance, but these are among the best CPU benchmarks to measure performance in single-threaded workloads, which helps quantify the snappiness in your system and correlates to performance in games that prize single-threaded performance. We've included a few web browser benchmarks below as well.

If you plan to compare to other gaming and application CPU benchmark results from reviews, forums, or friends, be sure to turn off as many background tasks as possible during your benchmarks to eliminate that influence from your CPU benchmark results. Here's a list with download links for some of the most common CPU benchmarks:

Best CPU Benchmarks You Can Run

• Cinebench R23 (MS Store (opens in new tab)) — This rendering CPU benchmark program has both single- and multi-core benchmark modes. This is one of the most commonly-used CPU benchmarks. 
• UL Benchmarks 3DMark — This synthetic CPU benchmark has a plethora of built-in tests for both CPUs and GPUs and is updated regularly with new tests. This is the go-to synthetic gaming test for many. 
• CPU-Z — This is a common utility that exposes the details of your processor, but it also has a built-in CPU benchmark that is incredibly simple to run. The single- and multi-thread test results don't correlate well to real-world tasks, but the tests' stability makes them well suited for before and after comparisons. CPU-Z test results are also widely shared among enthusiasts, so it's easy to find comparison systems. 
• POV-Ray — This rendering CPU benchmark has both single- and multi-threaded test options but uses a heavier distribution of AVX instructions than Cinebench to create a taxing CPU benchmark. 
• C-Ray — This CPU benchmark uses a raytracer rendering engine to measure a CPU's multi-threaded performance in floating-point operations. 
• HandBrake — The HandBrake encoder comes with a plethora of options, so you can easily tailor the encoding CPU benchmark to your needs. Simply measure the amount of time it takes to encode a video, and then use that as your baseline for comparison. 
• Corona — This is another popular rendering utility and is a simple-one click CPU benchmark that uses the Chaos Corona render engine to measure CPU performance in multi-threaded workloads. 
• WebXPRT 4 — This is a click-to-run CPU benchmark that runs in your browser to measure performance in HTML5, JavaScript, and WebAssembly-based tests. This is a great CPU benchmark to measure single-threaded performance.  
• ARES-6 — This is a click-to-run CPU benchmark that runs in your browser to measure performance in JavaScript but has a heavy weighting towards the neural network (machine learning) workloads that are becoming increasingly common. This is a great CPU benchmark to measure single-threaded performance.
• y-cruncher — This CPU benchmark runs from a command line, so it isn't the most user-friendly. However, it calculates Pi using the latest AVX instruction sets in a heavily-threaded manner, making it among the best to measure SIMD performance. Beware, this test can break overclocks easily (which also means it is great for stress testing). 

CPU Benchmarks Test System and Configuration 2022

Legacy Desktop CPU Benchmarks

Recognizing that a lot of older platforms are going to be paired with graphics subsystems multiple generations old, we wanted to define the top of our range to encourage balance between host processing and complementary GPUs. At this point, anyone with a Sandy Bridge-based Core i7 would realize a gain from stepping up to Coffee Lake or Kaby Lake, for example. And putting AMD's top FX CPUs next to a handful of Core i7s and those older Core i5s represents an upgrade to their status.

Currently, our hierarchy consists of 13 total tiers. The bottom half of the chart is largely outdated; you'll notice those CPUs dragging down performance in the latest games, whether you have one of the best graphics cards or not. If you own a CPU in that range, an upgrade could really take your experience to another level.

Really, it's the top five tiers or so that remain viable. And in that top half of the chart, an upgrade is typically worthwhile if it's a least a couple of tiers higher. Otherwise, there's just not enough improvement to warrant the expense of a fresh CPU, motherboard and RAM (not to mention the graphics card and storage solution you'd be considering as well). 

• Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Core i7-12700K and Core i9-12900K Face-Off: The Rise of 3D V-Cache
• Intel Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X: Alder Lake and Ryzen 5000 Face Off
• Intel Core i5-12600K vs AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and 5800X Face Off: Ryzen Has Fallen
• Intel Core i7-12700K vs AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and 5800X Face Off: Intel Rising
• Intel Core i5-12400 vs AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Face-Off: The Gaming Value Showdown

• MORE: Best CPUs for Gaming
• MORE: AMD vs Intel
• MORE: Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 All We Know
• MORE: How to Overclock a CPU
• MORE: How to check CPU Temperature
• MORE: All CPUs Content