Intel challenges AMD to “beat us” in “real-world” gaming with Ryzen 3rd Gen
Intel challenges AMD to “beat us” in “real-world” gaming with Ryzen 3rd Gen
While AMD has achieved higher clock speeds, packed increased IPC and offered larger cache sizes with their Zen 2-based Ryzen 3rd Generation processors, Intel remains convinced that their i9-9900K, or at least their upcoming i9-9900KS processor, will remain the king of the PC gaming market.Â
Intel has called on AMD to utilise real-world gaming performance data to describe their upcoming processors, rather than rely on benchmarks like Cinebench and tools like Blender to showcase the performance of their processors. Intel argues that these tools do not matter to consumers, but that real-world gaming tests do. Cutting through the marketing spin, Intel wants reviewers to focus on criteria which have highlighted Intel’s advantages over AMD’s existing Ryzen processors. Â
Below is a comment from Intel’s Jon Carvill, the company’s VP of Tech Market Leadership. Â
  So you’re going to hear a lot about gaming CPUs this week. They may or may not come from certain three letter acronyms. That said, here’s what I want to challenge you. I want to challenge you to challenge them. If they want this crown come beat us in real world gaming, real world gaming should be the defining criteria that we use to assess the world’s best gaming CPU. I challenge you to challenge anyone that wants to compete for this crown to come meet us in real world gaming. That’s the measure that we’re going to stand by.
In the benchmarks above, Intel claims that their i9-9900K processor is between 21% and 50% better than AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X CPU when gaming at 1080p in CPU limited scenarios.Â
What’s worth noting here is that Intel’s slide states that their results “may not reflect all publically available security updates” and that “software and workloads used in performance test may have been optimised for performance only on Intel microprocessors”, statements that leave us extremely unsatisfied with Intel’s performance data. Would Intel’s full spectre/meltdown mitigations harm their gaming performance? How has Intel “optimised” this workload for their processors? Put simply, are these results even fair? Â
Intel has also highlighted the “gaming impact” of PCI Express 4.0, stating that moving from PCIe 3.0 16x to PCIe 3.0 8x delivers an average framerate difference of 0.0099%, alleging that this is a difference that is not worth worrying about. Basically, Intel is belittling the benefits of PCIe 4.0 by saying that PCIe 3.0 x8 is enough for gaming workloads.Â
Only time will tell whether or not Intel’s confidence is warranted here, as we have not seen the real-world gaming performance of AMD’s Ryzen 3rd Generation processors at this time. Only time will tell whether or not Intel was right to be confident, but it is worth noting that there is more to the PC market than gaming, and that simply beating the i9-9900K isn’t a judge of who the real gaming champion is. Price/performance ratios will be a critical factor here, and this is a factor where AMD’s Ryzen lineup has always excelled.Â
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