A few gaming benchmarks of the Rocket Lake-S flagship, the Core i9-11900K (Qualification sample, mind you) have surfaced, showing rather lackluster gaming performance compared to the existing 10th Gen Core i9-10900K. Despite the sample being an engineering sample, both the CPUs were tested at a constant 5.2GHz, thanks to custom third-party cooling.
Out of the six games tested, the older Core i9-10900K wins in three titles while the Rocket Lake-S flagship manages to eke out wins in Wolfenstein and the RTS. Assassins’ Creed Valhalla is a tie while PUBG and Shadow of the Tomb Raider heavily favor the older Skylake-based chip. I doubt even BIOS updates or revisions will change that. Overall, it looks like the 11th Gen Core i9-11900K more or less performs the same as its predecessor in gaming workloads.
The additional cores on the Comet Lake-S flagship and what seem to be higher latencies blunt the single-threaded uplift of the newer Cypress Cove powering Rocket Lake-S. Regardless, don’t take this as the final verdict as the review embargo is still quite a bit away, so we may see the 11th Gen part take the lead in most third-party reviews, though I suspect it won’t be pretty slim.
