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. The Intel and AMD CPUs are separated by color, you can see the Ryzen 7 7800X3D at the bottom, and compare that with the Intel Core i7-14700K on top.
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.
At 4K, there is no difference between any CPU here, they all offer the same performance, and there is only a 1-2FPS difference. At 1440p, we start to see some separation with the Intel Core i7-14700K and Ryzen 7 7800X3D rising to the occasion, though the 14700K does beat the 7800X3D at 1440p by 4%. When comparing to the 12700K at 1440p the 14700K has a 6% advantage. We see even larger differences at 1080p, and by far the Intel Core i7-14700K takes the lead over every CPU here, even the 7800X3D. In fact, we see a bit of a bottleneck on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D between 1440p and 1080p, with very little scaling, whereas the 14700K scales better down to 1080p, with less bottlenecking.
It ends up so that the Intel Core i7-14700K is 15% faster than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which is very significant. Compared to the 12700K the 14700K is 20% faster, which again is a pretty large difference there from 12th to 14th Gen in gaming. Yes, the 7800X3D is the fastest CPU here from AMD, but the 14700K clearly beats it in Starfield.
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.
In Counter Strike 2 we see a lean toward the Intel CPUs winning out on performance, even at 4K this time. At 4K, the Intel Core i7-14700K is 8% faster than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and 7% faster than the fastest AMD CPU here the 7700X at 4K. The gains are even larger at 1440p and now the 14700K is 13% faster than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which is the fastest AMD CPU at 1440p. At 1080p, here the 14700K is 5% faster than the 12700K, and 3% faster than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is by far the fastest AMD CPU at 1080p, but the 1470K does edge it out on performance by 20FPS at 1080p.
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.
There is a slight 1-2FPS difference at 4K, otherwise in Cyberpunk the fun starts at 1440p. We find the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the fastest AMD CPU here, but the Intel Core i7-14700K is beating it by 1% at 1440p and is just a notch above the 12700K. At 1080p the 14700K and 7800X3D are also very close at 1% apart again, so the 7800X3D holds its own here, but so does the 14700K. The 14700K is 9% faster than the 12700K, showing improvements from 12th Gen to 14th Gen.