Leaked Intel Slides Show Raptor Lake Beating AMD Zen 4 in Gaming

Intel’s 13th generation Raptor Lake is launching today, and according to totally unbiased Intel, it’s amazing. The company has been prepping analysts for the big launch. Now slides from a presentation in India reveal Intel’s pitch in its battle with AMD. Shockingly, Intel says its new Core i9-13900K CPU is faster in gaming than the Ryzen 9 7950X. For content creation, Intel’s slides show parity in several apps, with Intel holding a slim margin in just one. In a refreshing bit of honest marketing, Intel seemingly acknowledges this stalemate in the labels on its slides. The info represents the first direct comparison between Raptor Lake and Zen 4. As you might recall, when Raptor Lake was announced it didn’t have numbers for AMD’s newest CPUs.

First up, in gaming Intel (and AMD) usually cherry-picks titles to show its CPU in the best light. That said, the games Intel lists in the slide are relatively common. Intel has also previously shown slides with so many games the chart was barely readable. The new slides were posted to Twitter by an attendee of the sales presentation. Intel also is seemingly playing fair by showing its CPU is not the fastest in all titles either. We respect that, Intel. Still, in the gaming category, it’s traditionally been close between Intel and AMD ever since Alder Lake. Intel notably reclaimed the gaming crown over Zen 3, only to hand it back to AMD’s V-Cache enabled Ryzen 7 5800X3D. That particular CPU is missing from Intel’s comparison charts for some reason. Interestingly, AMD also left it out of its own Zen 4 launch too. What a curious omission from both companies.

When it comes to content creation, it looks like it’s a wash, depending on the test. Intel’s slides show its Core i9 CPU having an advantage in AutoCAD, and that’s it. It’s interesting that Intel didn’t include what we now assume is the gold standard: Cinebench. There’s also nothing from Blender or the other usual suspects. We can all assume we know the results of those specific benchmarks due to their omission.

For its part, Intel is promising a 41 percent boost in multi-core performance over Alder Lake in certain scenarios. That’s a healthy jump, despite being built on the same Intel 7 process (formerly 10nm). AMD’s chips are built on TSMC’s 5nm process, so it’s interesting to see parity here despite the foundry differences. The chart headlines are also notable. For the gaming chart Intel claims “leadership,” but for content creation, it simply states a “leap in performance.” That reinforces the belief the two companies will likely trade blows here, with no clear winner.

Also, the big change with Raptor Lake is improved performance cores and more efficiency cores in some models. This has theoretically led to improved efficiency in some scenarios. As such, Intel is claiming its 13900K offers the same performance as the 12900K with just 25 percent of the power. If that ends up being true, that is an impressive leap. This seems to have been previously verified by Enthusiast Citizen on Bilibili. They showed the 13900K is just as powerful as the 12900K at 80W in “unlimited power” mode.

Eagle-eyed enthusiasts will look at these numbers from Intel and say, “Sure, but AMD hasn’t launched its V-Cache Zen 4 chip yet.” That is a valid observation, and if the past is prologue it will be a potent gaming CPU. AMD hasn’t released any details on it yet though, so we’ll have to wait and see on that one. Intel also has a Core i9-13900KS waiting in the wings too. That chip will reportedly offer a 6GHz boost clock. In other words, it’s the exact same scenario that played out this year between Zen 3 and Alder Lake’s swan songs. It’s also unclear if AMD will release only one V-Cache CPU or several.

This matchup between Intel and AMD has been anticipated for almost a year now, and third-party benchmarks will arrive shortly. It’s a true head-to-head fight in that Intel designed its hybrid architecture to overthrow AMD’s Zen architecture, and largely succeeded. Now we have a second round, hybrid-versus-chiplet face-off. With Intel’s cards fully laid out on the table, PC builders will finally be able to decide which platform they prefer for their next PC. The biggest advantage AMD has here is an all-new socket. It’s also promised to release compatible chips for it until “at least 2025.” Intel’s Raptor Lake will be the final chip on LGA 1700 before it too moves to a tile-based design next year.

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