The first reviews of the Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors have come out to a stellar reception from the press and enthusiasts. The Core i9-13900K featuring 24 cores (8P+16E) eats up everything for breakfast. On average, the Raptor Lake flagship is nearly 20% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X in gaming workloads, resetting the dynamics back to the Alder Lake launch. It’s worth noting that both the Core i5-13600K and the Core i7-13700K are faster than every Ryzen 7000 SKU in gaming. The former by 5% and the latter by 11%.
Moving to content creation workloads such as Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and After Effects, the Core i9-13900K maintains a notable lead over the Ryzen 9 7950X with the Core i7-13700K sandwiched in-between.
And finally, heavily threaded rendering workloads. This is where the Ryzen 7000 chips register their first win. In Blender and V-Ray, the Core i7-13700K and the i9-13900K manage to outmaneuver every other chip other than the Ryzen 9 7950X at the cost of increased power consumption.
Benchmark source: Puget Systems.
And here’s the kicker, the Ryzen 9 7950X costs $130 more than the Core i9-13900K (Microcenter).
We all knew Raptor Lake would be faster than Raphael in many scenarios, but it seems to have a complete advantage in almost every workload. The ball is in AMD’s court now, and I see a series of price cuts coming. With Zen 4’s V-Cache variants at least a couple of quarters away, that may be the only way to straighten the already faltering AM5 sales.
