Intel's strengths remain in its speed in lightly-threaded workloads where its high core frequencies provide a tangible benefit, but there is a limit to its scalability in heavily-threaded applications. For years, Intel's flagships were the only solution if you wanted the most powerful processor that money could buy.
The 9900K offered a 3% performance boost with the RX 5700 which still shows a GPU limitation scenario. Our Ryzen 9 left our Core i9 in the dust in every test except our single thread Geekbench and y-cruncher tests. There was 35% difference, in terms of performance. Under load, the flagship Ryzen can boost to 4.7 GHz, but you will need a beefy cooling solution to sustain such speeds.AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X is the pinnacle of the company’s mainstream processor lineup. The 9900K offers a base clock of 3.6 GHz, can boost to 5 GHz on up to two cores, and up to 4.7 GHz on all eight cores. That’s not to say the 3950X is at all bad for gaming, the results it offers are still realistically quite excellent, but to get the value out of it you’re also going to want to have some heavy multicore applications to take advantage of it, as the 10 core 10900K can still do quite well in plenty of multicore tasks, so it would depend how much your time is worth.Very informative! This allowed the 9900K to provide 15% more performance, even with the 5700.First up we have the 1080p ultra quality World War Z results. The 1% low performance is similar with the RX 5700, but it doesn’t push averages quite as high.At 1440p the margins are similar with the RTX 2080 Ti, but they close up a little with the RTX 2070 Super.
In this game the 10900K was able to hit 11% higher average FPS at 1080p.Hitman 2 was tested using the games built in benchmark, and there was a bigger difference this time. Testing was completed with the latest version of Windows and Nvidia drivers along with all BIOS updates available installed.Forza 4 Horizon was tested with games benchmark tool, and the differences were far more minimal here with the i9 just 8% ahead of the 3950X at 1080p resolution, so no real noteworthy difference between them.I’ve also tested the Cinebench R20 in the single core performance, though the I9-10900K was 0.5% ahead over the 3950X.All things considered, based on these results and the current prices, the 10900K is the way to go for gaming as it’s cheaper and performs better. Meanwhile, the 9900K enables mild performance gains, seeing a 6% boost from the 5700 to the 2070 Super and then 4% from the 2070 Super to the 2080 Ti.Lowering the quality preset to high sees very little change in performance to what was seen with ultra quality and the margins all remain much the same.World War Z at 1440p medium settings test shows similar scaling to the 1440p ultra results. But it all depends on whether you can use those cores or not.