Yes, the margins are pretty slim. The results above are each the result of three runs, averaged – except for Speed Way, which was so close I ended up running it five times on each system, averaging the highest three scores from each. Speed Way is still within the margin of error, and can be considered a tie – as it should, considering it will be completely GPU bound.
When not GPU bound, it seems that Intel’s Core i9-13900K certainly has the potential to provide better performance in games than the Ryzen 9 7950X. Time Spy is the closest approximation of a more CPU-bound scenario in the above chart, but what about a real game?
Having dropped Cyberpunk 2077 from the benchmark suite after its buggy performance for myself and other reviewers at the RTX 4090 launch, I decided to re-visit a reliable benchmark with the RTX 4090 FE, and Metro Exodus is as reliable as it gets (there’s a standalone benchmark app and you don’t even have to be online for it to work!).
As with the 3DMark tests above, the Core i9-13900K battles the Ryzen 9 7950X using our GeForce RTX 4090 FE card and the latest driver:
