CPU’s in Gaming
The general consensus in the industry is that your GPU is far more important than your CPU. While this is largely true, there is a significant impact to gaming performance in specific scenarios. While it doesn’t affect frame rates as much at higher resolution, it does impact the frame times. Your minimums and maximums will end up all over the place and the gameplay may not be smooth.
What I noticed primarily was that at 4K, my system ran considerably worse than those of people I knew using worse or similar hardware, that had an Intel CPU. That’s not to say that Ryzen series CPU’s can’t provide good gaming performance. They obviously do as we’ve tested that repeatedly. However, it’s clear that Intel still has a lead in gaming performance. Sometimes a substantial one. It’s usually only a few FPS or a small percentage of improvement.
I’ll talk about specific examples later on in this article, but suffice it to say, for someone who only plays games on their PC may see Intel as a viable alternative to AMD. While we have never covered any of the Intel Core i9 series thus far, a 9900K has appeared in the benchmarks since our first Ryzen 3900X review a couple of months back. If you’ve ever seen our CPU coverage of any CPU’s since then, you’ve seen results for the 9900K.
Given the 9900K is pretty well known, this may read a little less like a full review than one would expect. In some ways, this is pretty well beating a dead horse. There is almost no reason to benchmark the CPU vs. a stock 9900K as they are the same exact CPU. The iGPU function that the 9900K has isn’t something we’ve ever tested so at stock speeds. Aside from the iGPU these CPUs are identical. The numbers you’ve seen for months and will see here are essentially identical. I did test the 9900KF at stock speeds which were an effective way to waste time as it is in fact, the same CPU as the 9900K when the iGPU isn’t being utilized.
So, this is pretty much going to be a 9900K vs. 9900KF article with some other CPU’s included for reference.