Intel Raptor Lake processors should hopefully rank among the best gaming CPUs you can buy this year. In fact, new benchmarks indicate that they’ll offer a significant performance boost compared to team blue’s current 12th Gen chips, namely the Core i9 12900K.
Expreview appears to have obtained an Intel Raptor Lake engineering sample which looks like a Core i9 13900, based on the fact it has 24 cores (eight performance and 16 efficiency). Despite it not being final silicon, the 13th Gen CPU was able to outperform the Core i9 12900K by an average of 20% (via Wccftech).
The performance differentials were mostly present in multi-threaded applications and workloads, but the Intel Raptor Lake chip actually fell behind its Alder Lake counterpart in single-threaded benchmarks. However, this is likely symptomatic of its pre-production nature.
It’s only a matter of time before finalised 13th Gen Intel Core chips show up in benchmarks ahead of the Raptor Lake release date, which should land sometime later this year. Once those leaks do pop up, we should then have a better idea of whether you’d be better off building a gaming PC with an AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU instead.