Intel Core i9-13900KS Review: First To 6GHz, Fastest CPU Yet
Intel Core i9-13900KS: 3D Rendering, Audio and Video Encoding
LAME XP Audio Encoding
For this test, we created 16-copies of our own 223MB WAV file (an 11 minute Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME XP tool. Processing times are recorded below, listed in minutes:seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.
Intel's architectures perform particularly well with the LAME audio encoder. As such, the Core i9-13900KS outruns all of its competition yet again. Chalk up another victory for the Intel Core i9-13900KS.
Blackmagic RAW Video Encoding Speed
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests full-resolution Blackmagic RAW video decode performance. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both using 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
We saw more of the same in the Blackmagic RAW speed test. The Core i9-13900KS puts up marginally better numbers than its K-only counterpart, which is enough to put the chip in the overall lead.
Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark
Cinebench rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graphs below.
The Core i9-13900KS is able to break the 40K mark in Cinebench, besting the previous leader -- the Core i9-13900K -- by a couple of percentage points. The Core i9-13900KS also offered the best single-threaded score of the group by a comfortable margin.
POV-Ray CPU Ray Tracing Benchmark
POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.
POV-Ray's results mirror Cinebench. The Core i9-13900KS scores another pair of victories, besting all of the other processors in both the single and multi-threaded tests.
Blender Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation to simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. It has a purpose-built benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model (or models). We used the CPU-focused benchmark with all three models currently available...
The heavily threaded, modern workloads of Blender push all of the P-cores on the Core i9-13900KS to their limit, and as such, it performs right on top of the Core i9-13900K. AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 7950X takes the overall lead here, however.
Y-Cruncher Multi-Threaded Pi Calculator
Y-Cruncher is a multi-core-capable tool that calculates the value of pi to a specified number of digits. In this case, we ran the tool on all threads and had the application calculate the value of pi to 1 billion digits. The values below are the time required to perform the calculation expressed in seconds. As a result, lower values indicate better performance.
No surprises in the Y-Cruncher benchmark. The Core i9-13900KS finishes in the pole position yet again but by just a hair.
No surprises in the Y-Cruncher benchmark. The Core i9-13900KS finishes in the pole position yet again but by just a hair.
STARS Euler3d Multi-Threaded CFD Benchmark
STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.
This benchmark ran exceptionally well on the Raptor Lake-S 13th Gen Core processors, thanks to their larger caches, higher-clocks, and increased memory bandwidth. Though it technically outran the Core i9-13900K, the delta separating the two processors falls within the margin of error.
This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, and cache and memory latency, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache sizes / speed and memory bandwidth affect the score as well...
This benchmark ran exceptionally well on the Raptor Lake-S 13th Gen Core processors, thanks to their larger caches, higher-clocks, and increased memory bandwidth. Though it technically outran the Core i9-13900K, the delta separating the two processors falls within the margin of error.
