Intel’s 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors are faster than the Ryzen 7000 chips in almost every workload except rendering. Team Blue now holds the lead in gaming, video and photo editing, and even some content creation workloads. The deltas are most apparent in gaming, where even the $329 Core i5-13600K beats the $699 Ryzen 9 7950X by a clear margin. In Linux gaming, however, things are looking pretty different:
Benchmarks conducted by Phoronix show the Zen 4 parts decisively beating the Core i9-13900K at low and medium-quality graphics presets. At ultra, however, the RPL flagship performs similarly but not entirely on the same level as even the Ryzen 7 7700X.
This seems to be a driverside issue where the API overhead limits Intel’s hybrid core processors. This is most apparent in Total War: Three Kingdoms. In this case, the 12900K and 13900K are slower than the 11th Gen 11900K as well as AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one title where the Core i9-13900K performs roughly the same as the Ryzen 9 7950X and the 5800X3D, especially at 1080p High. The former goes on to take the lead in Xonotic, leading the Raphael offerings by over 40 FPS at 1080p Ultra.
Unvanquished performs similarly, leaving a marginal delta between the Red and Blue processors. The Ryzen 9 7950X wins at “Ultra” graphics quality while the 13900K takes the cake at “High”.
It’s clear that when it comes to Linux, the drivers and API are as important as the hardware (if not more). Vulkan does an excellent job of limiting overhead, but older high-level APIs and emulators are a no-go.
