The biggest takeaway from this article is that you really shouldn't worry about the E-Cores. Titles such as Far Cry 6 and Divinity Original Sin 2 run better with E-Cores enabled, while CPU limited, but as soon as they are GPU limited, there is only marginal difference. The opposite behavior is observed, too, of course. We also have games that run better with E-Cores disabled, but only as long as they are CPU limited (Far Cry 5, Metro Exodus). The next group of games are titles that always run better with E-Cores enabled (Age of Empires, Dota 2). There's those games that really show no differences, E-Cores enabled or not (AC: Valhalla, Days Gone, DOOM Eternal, Monster Hunter, Witcher 3). If we look through all the games we can divide them into several groups. In between these two extremes, the majority of games still show too insignificant a variation, and we end up with a stalemate between the two configurations. And much like 1440p, there are outliers to make the case for each setup-Prey, Metro Exodus, GreedFall, and Far Cry 5 each post significant 8-10% performance gains with the E-cores being disabled whereas Warhammer III, Spider-Man Remastered, Far Cry 6, Dota 2, and Civilization VI, prefer the E-cores left untouched. Even with the highest IPC and clocks in the market, when averaged across all games, the two configurations of the i9-13900K post a difference of just 0.9% in favor of the stock configuration with the E-cores enabled. The RTX 4090 rips through frames, and the CPU isn't fast enough to keep up. The average is also dragged down by the vast number of games with under 2% deltas, and so we end up with the 0.4% average.ฤก080p is the new 720p in context of our TPU50 articles, as this is where the graphics processing bottleneck is firmly in the court of the CPU. But then again, these games are too small in number to affect the average, and the gains cancel each other out. Conversely, with the E-cores enabled, Far Cry 6 improves by 10.2%, Spider-Man Remastered by 8%, and Dota 2 by 7%. With E-cores disabled, Prey gains 11.3% performance. There are more games that post noteworthy performance differences in either configurations. Still, the 53-game average delta ends up just 0.4% in favor of the stock i9-13900K. ![]() The RTX 4090 is way overkill for this resolution, no matter the refresh rate. Things begin to get interesting at 1440p. Every other title has a negligible performance delta, which is why these handful of games can almost considered outliers. On the other hand, games like Dota 2, Hitman 3, and AoE IV, post 2.8-7.2% gains with E-cores enabled. ![]() Games like Far Cry 5 and Spider-Man Remastered see 2.6-4.3% frame-rate improvements. You have to pay attention to the individual game tests. With its E-cores disabled, the i9-13900K is a negligible 0.1% slower than the stock i9-13900K (E-cores enabled), but this is when averaged across all 53 games. At this resolution, the bottleneck is in the GPU's court. We begin our comparison with the 4K Ultra HD (3840x2160 pixels) resolution, which is what the GeForce RTX 4090 was designed for. If you look at AMD's 12-core and 16-core Ryzen chips, they only have 6 or 8 cores per CCD, and gaming workloads being localized to one of the two CCDs has a positive impact on frame-rates. Intel determined 8 to be the ideal number of P-cores for the client-desktop platform right now, which means they think that 8 cores ought to be enough for gaming. In a way, we're halving the number of logical processors when we disable the E-cores and in another way, we're disabling two-thirds of the cores. The 16 E-cores lack HT, so 16 threads from there, and we end up with 32. The 8 P-cores support HyperThreading, and so we get 16 threads from them. Technically, the top "Raptor Lake" part is a 24-core/32-thread processor. But we're not comparing the i9-13900K to the 7950X in this article rather we're comparing the i9-13900K against itself, with its E-cores disabled. The price difference between the i9-13900K and 7950X could get you an RX 7900 XTX over the RX 7900 XT. It can actually save you a few bucks over the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, money saved that you can spend on a faster GPU. ConclusionThe Core i9-13900K "Raptor Lake" really is the best processor you can buy for gaming, if money is no bar.
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