Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake processors launched a while back, promising top-of-the-line gaming, and leading multi-threaded performance with support for DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5 interface. Fast forward to the present day, though, and AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are still leading sales across most markets. Puget Systems has done a comprehensive analysis of how these chips perform in Epic’s Unreal Engine. Before we move on, please note that Unreal Engine is one of the leading game development engines for PC and consoles, accounting for roughly a quarter of games released every year.
To our surprise, the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X are the two fastest CPUs in most benchmarks, with the Core i9-12900K coming in third, followed by the Core i7-12700K and the Ryzen 7 5800X. We’ll ignore the DDR5 version of the 12900K as DDR5 modules have all but disappeared from the market. The only test where the Core i9-12900K comes out on top is the frame rate test, where it’s 15% faster than the 5950X. In everything else, the Ryzen 9 SKUs consistently beat the hybrid CPU.
Overall, the Ryzen 9 5950X is 30% faster than the Core i9-12900K (with DDR4 memory) while the 5900X beats it by over 10% on average.
