Intel Core i9 13900K and Core i5 13600K review: an effective redoubt against AMD's Ryzen 7000 advances

We've run our benchmarks at the standard three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p and 4K, but we're focusing the bulk of our attention on those 1080p results, as this is where differences between different CPUs are most visible. (There's an argument for testing at 720p to make these deltas even more visible, but even mainstream PC gaming has long since moved onto 1080p.) We're using an Asus RTX 3090 OC graphics card for these results.

This page is all about the fps you get in FPS games. Our trio of games in this section includes Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The latter two are RT-enabled benchmarks, as we examine performance in their single-player campaigns.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike remains the gold standard for competitive FPS, and is unique amongst our benchmark suite as it is a DirectX 9 title that can be played on even modest hardware at hundreds of frames per second. Regardless, serious players value a high and stable frame-rate, and going for a modern CPU like the ones we've tested can result in a much better experience when playing on a suitably high-refresh rate gaming monitor.

AMD Ryzen processors have historically scored extremely well in this test, thanks to their excellent single-core speeds, but we have a new champion: the 13900K reclaims the throne for Intel. There's not much in it - only a four percent advantage for the 13900K over the 7900X - but it's an impressive showing nonetheless. Note that in terms of minimum frame-rate, it's also quite close, with the 13900K holding a six percent advantage. Towards the mid-range, the 13600K isn't able to perform as well, with the 7600X holding a three percent advantage.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is an RT-only variant of the vanilla game, run here with DLSS engaged to uncouple the GPU and push the strain onto the CPU as much as possible. The test scene we're using comes from the very beginning of The Volga level, with Artyom and Anna discussing their hopes for the future before running into a hostile camp.

As in the game, there are some oddities here. As we've seen with Ryzen 7000, the mid-range CPUs seem to outperform the flagships by a small margin, with the 7600X eclipsing the 7900X and now the 13600K beating the 13900K. There's about five percent in it on the Intel side, a state of affairs that persisted across multiple retests with both the 13900K and 13600K that therefore seems legitimate. This is also the best showing for Ryzen 7000 so far, with around a 20 percent advantage for Team Red when comparing the Core/Ryzen 5 and Core/Ryzen 9 models. Note that the 5800X3D also performs excellently here, right in line with Ryzen 7000, so a future Ryzen 7000 'X3D' processor with additional L3 cache could do extremely well here.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War comes next. Here, the focus is less on competitive performance and more on the single-player side of things, as we enable ray tracing and hop into one of the first campaign missions, Fracture Jaw. Interestingly, this mission has RT disabled on consoles, even when the option is enabled elsewhere in the game, suggesting that the BVH building process here is particularly tough. The opening scene, as Bell joins Adler on the fields of Vietnam, is heavy on the CPU at the relatively low graphical settings we've chosen.

We return to normality here, with the 13900K beating the 7900X by six percent and the 13600K eclipsing the 7600X by four percent. So you're getting a great experience on either side, but it's Intel that holds the slim advantage. In terms of acceptable performance, basically anything north of a 12600K or 5950X does well, with the 5800X3D outperforming the 5800X but not making a real impact otherwise.

We conclude our new standard gaming tests on the next page, where we take on Cyberpunk 2077 and two new editions of Digital Foundry favourites: Far Cry 6 and Crysis 3 Remastered.

Intel Core i9 13900K and Core i5 13600K analysis

• Introduction, test rig and content creation benchmarks
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3
• Gaming benchmarks: Counter-Strike: GO, Metro Exodus EE, Black Ops Cold War [this page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Crysis 3 Remastered
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• Z790: platform overview and motherboard analysis
• Intel Core i9 13900K and Core i5 13600K: the Digital Foundry verdict