When it comes to marketing and PR, it’d be fair to say that AMD has been doing a much better job than rival Intel over the last few years. The main reason being that before the advent of the Zen-based Ryzen processors, the company had a complete monopoly over the CPU market. Things have drastically changed now. The Ryzen 3000 processors are faster than the 9th Gen Intel Core processors, except in gaming where they trail by less than a handful of frames per sec. However, Intel is adamant that the Core i9-9900K is still the best CPU for Gaming and something the company calls “Real Programs”. In a recently held press conference recently in India, team blue tried to demonstrate the meaning of “real-world” performance. In a rather petty move, they quoted the textbook definition of the term from John Hennessy and David Patterson’s popular title, “Computer Architecture”. So how legit are Intel’s claims? Are the Ryzen processors really worse off than blue team’s chips? Let’s find out!
Intel’s Real World Performance Claims Demystified
Here you can see Intel’s new Anthem that Cinebench doesn’t give a real-world measure of performance and applications like MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop and Google Chrome are what most mainstream users use. I have no objection with that statement but the fact that Intel uses SYSmark and WebXPRT 3 to measure performance is rather dubious. There are much more reputed benchmarks for the same such as 7-zip, Mozilla Kraken and Google’s very own Jetstream. For creativity, the Magix Vega Pro is also a more reliable alternative and Handbrake by far is the most popular encoding software.
So, let’s have a look at what these well reputed benchmarks tell us:
Oh, that doesn’t seem right! Yeah, that’s because most of Intel’s slides were blatant marketing material to mislead consumers. As you can see, the 3rd Gen Ryzen parts beat their 14nm Intel rivals in pretty much every test by a notable margin, all the while costing less. Furthermore, as you can see in the Jetstream test, the Core i9-9900K performs worse than both the Ryzen 7 3700X as well as the Core i9-9700K. Why is that? It’s simply because the difference between various processors in applications like word processing, browsers, and video playback is so small that it’s not quite perceivable.
In other applications like 7-zip, Magix and Handbreak where the deltas are much wider between the high-end and mid-range chips, the Ryzen 9 is as much as 50% faster than the Core i9-9900K. No wonder Intel didn’t include these in the “real-world” benchmarks.
AMD Ryzen 3000 vs Intel 9th Gen Gaming Performance
I’ll have to agree with this though. Yes, Intel CPUs are faster than competing Ryzen chips by a very small margin (less than 1.1% as per Intel’s own slides). But, and there’s always a but. Are you willing to go with team blue to get that extra 5% gaming performance and lose out on the advantages of Zen 2 apparent in every other workload? NO.
Furthermore, there’s a curious thing about these game benchmarks. Most of them are of the older DX11 games which are known to leverage only a few CPU cores. A very good example is Shadow of War which barely uses a third of a modern processor on an average. As DirectX 12 and Vulkan become more prominent and their implementations improve, we’ll see AMD’s Ryzen CPUs beat Intel in the gaming space as well. This is very evident in Ashes of the Singularity. Granted, it is an AMD sponsored game, but it still runs well on all hardware. The Ryzen chips beat the Intel competition quite handily here. Why? Because this game utilizes all the cores properly.
It will take a few years for games to become more CPU dependent, but it’ll happen sooner than Intel wants you to believe. Just look at the next-gen Xbox Scarlett and PS5 consoles. They’re both based on the 7nm Zen 2 cores, so we have good reason to believe that the majority of games developed for them will run wonderfully on Ryzen CPUs.
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Benchmark Creds: Guru3D.com