Intel's 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" is shaping up to be another leadership desktop processor lineup, with an engineering sample clocking significant increases in gaming minimum framerates over the preceding 12th Gen Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake." Extreme Player, a tech-blogger on Chinese video streaming site Bilibili, posted a comprehensive gaming performance review of an i9-13900K engineering sample covering eight games across three resolutions, comparing it with a retail i9-12900KF. The games include CS:GO, Final Fantasy IX: Endwalker, PUBG, Forza Horizon 5, Far Cry 6, Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and the synthetic benchmark 3DMark. Both processors were tested with a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, 32 GB of DDR5-6400 memory, and a 1.5 kW power supply.

The i9-13900K ES is shown posting performance leads ranging wildly between 1% to 2% in the graphics tests of 3DMark, but an incredible 36% to 38% gain in the CPU-intensive tests of the suite. This is explained not just by increased per-core performance of both the P-cores and E-cores, but also the addition of 8 more E-cores. Although the same "Gracemont" E-cores are used in "Raptor Lake," the L2 cache size per E-core cluster has been doubled in size. Horizon Zero Dawn sees -0.7% to 10.98% increase in frame rates. There are some anomalous 70% frame-rate increases in RDR2, discounting which, we still see a 2-9% increase. FC6 posts modest 2.4% increases. Forza Horizon 5, PUBG, Monster Hunter Rise, and FF IX, each report significant increases in minimum framerates, well above 20%.The second graph below shows the highlight of these tests, significant increases in minimum frame-rates. Averaged across tests, the i9-13900K ES is shown posting a 11.65% min FPS gain at 4K UHD; 21.84% increase at 1440p, and 27.99% increase at 1080p.

A big caveat with all this testing are the CPU clock speeds. Engineering samples do not tend to come with the clock speeds or boosting behavior of the retail processors, and hence don't correctly reflect the end product, although some ES chips may come with unlocked multipliers. In this testing, the i9-13900K ES was set at a maximum P-core clock speed of 5.50 GHz all-core. 5.50 GHz was assumed to be the max boost frequency of the retail chip, and compared with an i9-12900KF that boosts up to 5.20 GHz for the P-cores, but was running at 4.90 GHz all-core.

The i9-13900K ES was also subjected to power-consumption testing, where it posted significant peak gaming power compared to the retail i9-12900KF. A retail i9-13900K will likely come with lower power-consumption than what is shown here, as it will follow boosting behavior typical of retail chips at stock frequencies, when compared to an ES that's been specified to run at a certain frequency.

Intel is preparing to launch its 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processor family in the second half of 2022. This period could also see rival AMD introduce its Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" processors. "Raptor Lake" combines 8 "Raptor Cove" P-cores with 16 "Gracemont" E-cores, and additional L2 cache for both core types. The I/O of these chips is expected to be similar to "Alder Lake," and hence they're built for the same LGA1700 platform.