Gaming Performance
We are going to focus on the 4K, 1440p, and 1080p gameplay performance. The common GPU used for every CPU is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition video card. Each graph has all three resolutions on each CPU included, but the order and sorting do not change in each graph. You can look at the framerate between CPUs at each resolution. We know that the extra cores and threads win in applications and multi-core/thread benchmarks, but does that translate to games?
Starfield
Let’s start with Starfield, seeing as it is a very recent game, and also as many have found CPU-driven or dependent depending on where you are in the game. We are testing on New Atlantis, and have devised a long manual run-through walking across the entire city mostly. It tests a lot of areas of dense populace, as well as areas with trees and water inside the city. We are testing the game at the highest in-game settings but with FSR/upscaling disabled, therefore no dynamic resolution. We have VRS enabled, and everything else enabled, and we set the resolution by the desktop resolution for the game. We are using patched game version 1.7.36.
Let’s just get 4K out of the way, there was no difference between the CPUs here, even in this game. At 1440p though, things start to get interesting. Firstly, there isn’t much difference between the 13600K and 14600K at 1440p, but there sure is when looking at the competition. The Intel Core i5-14600K is 9% faster than the Ryzen 7 7700X even at 1440p, that’s a real difference right there. It gets even crazier at 1080p where the 14600K is 20% faster than the Ryzen 7 7700X and 7600X! Those are big gains to be honest. We even see that the new 14600K is 3% faster than the 13600K at 1080p, that increased clock speed is showing a difference in this game. You can really see how the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 5 7600X are CPU bottlenecked at 1440p to 1080p in this game with a 4090.
Counter Strike 2
The next one we are going to hit up is Counter Strike 2, because of course we are! To perform our test we are doing a manual run-through in Mirage, on Warmup, so there are no characters or character interactions here, it is purely a clean map run just to get the maximum performance and see if there is any difference between the CPUs in this new game. We are running the game on the “Very High” graphics preset, and VSYNC is OFF. In addition, we are utilizing the “fps_max 0” command to unlock the 400FPS game cap for full performance.
At first glance, it doesn’t look like there is much difference here, but take a look at those 1440p and 4K numbers actually, not the 1080p numbers. Weird behavior as it is, we are seeing a greater benefit of difference between the CPUs at 4K and 1440p in this game, rather than 1080p as we’d expect it to be. Our theory is simply that there are other limitations, perhaps GPU utilization, that is just not that great at 1080p so we are actually bottlenecking the GPU? Perhaps when we become more GPU dependent at 1440p and 4K the CPUs can actually allow the GPU to perform better, or be better utilized, and now we see a difference in CPU performance.
At any rate, this is what we experienced, and it shows that the Intel Core i5-14600K is 2.4% faster than the 13600K at 4K and about the same at 1440p and 1% faster at 1080p. However, compared to the competition, we see a bigger gain in performance at 4K and especially 1440p. The 14600K is 10% faster than the 7700X and 7600X at 4K, which is crazy to see that much difference at 4K. At 1440p the 14600K is 15% faster than the 7700X and 7600X, an even greater degree. however, at 1080p, it leans toward the 7700X and 7600X slightly.
Cyberpunk 2077
Next up is the venerable Cyberpunk 2077. We have updated the game to version 2.01, so Cyberpunk v2.0 is fully being tested here. We are running the game at the “Ultra” graphics preset, and running the benchmark.
We actually do see a slight performance difference at 4K here, with a couple of FPS greater on the Intel CPUs. At 1440p though we see the 14600K is 3% faster than the 7700X and 7600X. At 1080p we see a greater difference with the 14600K performing 4% faster than the 7700X but a bigger 10% difference over the 7600X. The 7700X actually performs a good deal faster than the 7600X at 1080p. We also see that the 14600K is 3.4% faster than the 13600K at 1080p.