Intel has been marketing the new Core i9 9900K as the fastest gaming CPU money can buy - and while a massive amount of controversy has surrounded the accuracy of pre-release benchmarks, the logic is sound. After all, the existing Core i7 8700K holds the title, ahead of its Ryzen 7 2700X competition. The new 9900K adds two additional cores and four threads, while boosting frequencies and increasing cache - improving on the 8700K in every way. Going into this review, my only question was this: to what extent do games actually make use of the additional resources? After all, the 8700K was already a performance monster, and arguably under-utilised. Do we actually need more gaming power?
Help comes in the form of Nvidia's recently released GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. It delivers a substantial increase in performance over the Pascal GPUs we've usually used for CPU performance testing, meaning that we have the graphics hardware to drive games faster, to even higher frame-rates. At 1080p, RTX 2080 Ti's silicon is blisteringly rapid, but staggeringly expensive - but the best of today's 'here and now' GPUs represents the mainstream not too far into the future. Although 1080p still rules, higher monitor resolutions are also gaining more popularity, so this time, our tests also include 1440p and 4K metrics. The prevailing notion is that at 1440p and higher, processor choice has little to no impact on performance but to what extent is this true?
But before we go on, a word on benchmarks and their effectiveness when assessing a CPU. For starters, most canned benchmarks provided in games only really test the graphics hardware, and don't run full game logic, making them pointless for CPU testing - something we've covered already. However, a new wave of tools built into games like Forza Horizon 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed Origins/Odyssey aim to test both CPU and GPU comprehensively, while Ashes of the Singularity and Gears of War 4 have been offering this kind of functionality for years. But for titles without this kind of detail or for games without benchmarks at all, performance differentials will be affected by the GPU you're using, the memory plugged into your system and sometimes even by the storage you're running games from. To cut a long story short: accurate CPU testing in games is challenging - and I'm still not entirely sure we're capable of showing you the full picture.
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