Intel's Core i9-12900K beats Ryzen 9 5950X by 39% in Ashes of the Singularity

nanoguy

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In brief: Alder Lake's performance is slowly coming into focus as more benchmark results show up online. Although Intel has yet to reveal its 12th generation Core processors, it looks like the top-end Core i9-12900K could offer significantly better performance in some games compared to AMD's current flagship CPU, the Ryzen 9 5950X.

Back in July, it transpired that Intel's Core i9-12900K Alder Lake CPUs were already on sale in China. Since then, we've seen a number of alleged benchmarks of the new chip. As we get closer to the official reveal next month, more results are popping up online, and all of them suggest that Intel has a big winner on its hands.

Early benchmarks showed the new 16-core, 24-thread flagship CPU has the potential to challenge AMD's Zen 3 powerhouse -- the 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X. However, most of these tests were performed on Geekbench's v5 suite, which can only offer a rough idea of the general performance you can expect out of a CPU.

This week, someone performed a set of Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS) benchmarks on an alleged Core i9-12900K sample. The results were spotted by Twitter user @9550pro (thanks, Tom's Hardware), and they seem to indicate the Core i9-12900K will be significantly faster in some games than the AMD counterpart.

To put things in context, Stardock recently updated Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation to version 3.1, which allows the game engine to use up to 16 cores simultaneously to make draw calls to the GPU. Previously, the game was only able to utilize up to half as many cores, so performance should see a significant uplift for systems equipped with CPUs that have more than eight physical cores.

It certainly looks to be the case with the Core i9-12900K, which scored over 14,000 points when paired with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 in the AoTS benchmark using the High 1440p preset. That's almost 39 percent faster than AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X paired with the same GPU.

As impressive as they seem, these results should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, as we only know surface-level details about the test systems. Furthermore, the Alder Lake part will also have to prove its value in productivity workloads, energy efficiency, and cooling requirements against AMD's current offerings.

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I'm hoping these results are an accurate reflection of the overall performance of the new processors and not just the gaming performance. Competition will force both companies to make better/faster processors and in the end the consumers ultimately benefit from more competition.
 
Interesting to see how they'll perform, and how AMD will answer, unfortunately it's pretty much useless as graphics cards are overpriced when available.
Wait, how does the 12900K has 16 cores but only 24 threads? Does this means only 12 cores are "Big" cores with hyperthreading and the other 6 are the "small" ones without?
8 big cores with HT, and 8 small cores with no HT, 16+8=24.
 
A more fair comparison will be putting it up against the AM4 parts, as those are technically the competition for these 12th gen Intel parts.

 
So, a five year old game that nobody plays, but probably got a paid-for update from Intel to optimize the benchmark, somehow qualifies as a "win"

Call me back when they can perform this same magic on a real 2021 game.

Stardock only released Ashes as the first DX12 game to win free press releases - since then, everyone except Intel has forgotten about it!
 
A more fair comparison will be putting it up against the AM4 parts, as those are technically the competition for these 12th gen Intel parts.
Presumably you mean the Zen 3 refresh on AM4? If such parts exist which they probably do. Socket AM5 isn’t out for a year, which means we could get two more products ranges out of Intel before then.
 
Once Intel got a handle on their 10nm (Now Intel 7) node they were always going to come roaring back in single threaded performance. 10nm superfin is a pretty significant step from what I have read.

I think you can expect some significant gains with Alder Lake as well as Zen 4 moving onto TSMC 5nm. New platforms, new memory.

I don't think we will have to wait long before AMD start the leaking of Zen 4 performance to make sure Intel don't get all the glory this year. Beyond performance the annoying question of availability could determine the outcome for many people.
 
Lmao the conspiracy theories are already emerging!

I heard that Intel are so evil they stab babies for fun and wear endangered whaleskin suits. :p
Wouldn't be the first time



When Star Dock is a tiny developer, an update this big 5 years later (with a daily player count around thirty) has "paid optimization" written all over it!
 
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Once Intel got a handle on their 10nm (Now Intel 7) node they were always going to come roaring back in single threaded performance. 10nm superfin is a pretty significant step from what I have read.

I think you can expect some significant gains with Alder Lake as well as Zen 4 moving onto TSMC 5nm. New platforms, new memory.

I don't think we will have to wait long before AMD start the leaking of Zen 4 performance to make sure Intel don't get all the glory this year. Beyond performance the annoying question of availability could determine the outcome for many people.
ADL will really be competing with Zen 3d refresh coming out at the end of this year.

Zen 4 will be dealing with Raptor Lake.
 
Lmao the conspiracy theories are already emerging!

I heard that Intel are so evil they stab babies for fun and wear endangered whaleskin suits. :p

See the comment directly below yours that shows the change log for V3.1 of AotS. They have increased thread count to 24 from 16. Why not increase it from 16 to 32...? Since, you know, AMD has had 32 thread CPUs since the 1950X threadripper and the 3950X on AM4...just sayin'.
 
ADL will really be competing with Zen 3d refresh coming out at the end of this year.

Zen 4 will be dealing with Raptor Lake.

Possibly, very much depending on how you determine the schedule. Release dates staggered and delayed as they have been for some time and unknown for certain.

Be lucky to get much in the way of Alder Lake availability or a full product stack until well into 2022 at this rate. Most sources now claim you won't see anything below the 'enthusiast' parts until CES 2022 which means a January launch. And then availability after this? Questionable. Delays lie not just with the CPUs but with the chipsets.

It's either a Zen 3 refresh to fill the gap until a 'late' Q3 2022 Zen 4 release or something else. Mere rumours at this stage. AMD aren't above refreshing parts and then quickly knocking out a new generation.

Entirely possible you won't get near a mainstream Alder Lake CPU and board until Easter 2022. It's also entirely possible AMD might spring Zen 4 not long after that rather than some claims putting it later in the year. We'll see.
 
See the comment directly below yours that shows the change log for V3.1 of AotS. They have increased thread count to 24 from 16. Why not increase it from 16 to 32...? Since, you know, AMD has had 32 thread CPUs since the 1950X threadripper and the 3950X on AM4...just sayin'.
Why haven’t AMD updated the benchmark? And also a screenshot of a forum post isn’t exactly hard evidence...

I was just commenting that everyone jumps to the conclusion that these companies are “evil”, usually out of spite. There is little to no evidence of malpractice from these companies these days. The most recent was some class action against AMD about core counts on its FX parts.

Intel nor AMD really aren’t “evil”. It’s just fantasy. I genuinely pity anyone who feels one is more evil than the other.
 
Why haven’t AMD updated the benchmark?
How does AMD update a benchmark when they don't own the source code?

Possibly, very much depending on how you determine the schedule. Release dates staggered and delayed as they have been for some time and unknown for certain.

Be lucky to get much in the way of Alder Lake availability or a full product stack until well into 2022 at this rate. Most sources now claim you won't see anything below the 'enthusiast' parts until CES 2022 which means a January launch. And then availability after this? Questionable. Delays lie not just with the CPUs but with the chipsets.

It's either a Zen 3 refresh to fill the gap until a 'late' Q3 2022 Zen 4 release or something else. Mere rumours at this stage. AMD aren't above refreshing parts and then quickly knocking out a new generation.

Entirely possible you won't get near a mainstream Alder Lake CPU and board until Easter 2022. It's also entirely possible AMD might spring Zen 4 not long after that rather than some claims putting it later in the year. We'll see.

I agree with you here Oct will be a paper launch for ADL. With "Maybe" mass availability in Nov/Dec but that could also be Jan. The Zen 3d refresh is suppose to be end of the year but that could easily slip to jan as well based on market "covid" conditions.
 
How does AMD update a benchmark when they don't own the source code?
Ok so why would you expect Intel to update the benchmark to benefit their competitors products and not theirs?

Look I’m not getting dragged into these fanboy arguments. Intel are not an “evil“ company. The only people who claim they are tend to have an irrational emotional connection to AMD. Like it’s some way to justify their irrational love.

Besides, even with 25% of cores not in use on Ryzen, they lost by 39% in this leaked benchmark. It’s exciting, we could be seeing a big bump up in consumer grade compute performance. Who doesn’t want that!? (Apart from AMD and it’s unpaid marketing agents of course).

Im looking forward to the actual results From third parties. It would be positive for consumers if Intel raise their game. It would be bad if they do not.
 
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