Gaming Benchmarks Part 1
Now we come to the meat and potatoes of the Core i9-10900K. This is a follow up to the world’s fastest gaming processor. Intel claims it is the new king of that arena. Frankly, it has to be as it gets pummeled pretty badly by the Ryzen 9 3900X which has been around for the better part of a year now.
Generally, we are usually more GPU bound than CPU bound, but as you’ll see the CPU still matters even in GPU bound conditions. Also, many people still game at 1080P, which highlights stronger CPU’s as this is a somewhat CPU bound resolution.
3DMark 10
Gaming is where Intel tends to shine, so the results aren’t surprising. While this is a synthetic test, it does mimic what we see in reality as the extra cores generally aren’t as useful as the clock speeds are. Intel also has some architectural advantages where gaming is concerned.
Destiny 2
I apologize for the ugly graphs. The logarithmic scales were necessary given the huge gap between the minimums and the maximum frame rates here. Naturally, the 10900K achieves the highest scores here. Even hitting a 30FPS minimum requires a bit of overclocking to achieve it. That said, the game rarely does this, and its something that only shows up in the benchmarks.
Oddly, overclocking produces an inverse result of the earlier test regarding minimum frame rates. Also odd is that the older 9900K is faster when it comes to the maximum FPS numbers. That said, the averages favor the overclocked 10900K.