Intel Alder Lake Core i9-12900K shown to be 56% faster than AMD Ryzen 9 5900X in Time Spy CPU, but gaming advantages over Ryzen 9 5950X seem miniscule with Radeon RX 6600 and DDR4 RAM

AMD launched the budget-oriented Radeon RX 6600 desktop GPU yesterday and many reviewers have already had access to the card for a while now. While that part is not surprising, a reviewer who has posted some results on the Chinese site Bilibili seems to have tested the RX 6600 in combination with Intel's upcoming Alder Lake Core i9-12900K CPU. 

Apparently, the OP "Enthusiastic Citizen" had early access to the Z690 platform but wasn't mindful of Intel's embargo. The actual motherboard itself has been blurred out, but it is likely to be an Asus Prime or ASRock Steel Legend Z690 variant. The GPU being tested is an ASRock Radeon RX 6600 while the memory used was a Zadak DDR4-3866 with timings 14-14-14-34. 

The 3DMark Time Spy, Time Spy Extreme, Fire Strike Extreme, and Fire Strike Ultra results can be seen in the screenshots below. Taking the Time Spy CPU score of 17,915 as an example, we see that the Core i9-12900K is about 55.71% faster than an average AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 39.34% faster than an average Ryzen 9 5950X, and about 37% faster than an average Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K. 

The OP also shared the result of a Forza Horizon 4 benchmark at 1080p involving the Core i9-12900K and the Radeon RX 6600 PC on Windows 11. Comparing the results with a Ryzen 9 5950X and RX 6600 combination running under Windows 10 (via @9550pro on Twitter), we see that the Alder Lake configuration has a miniscule fps advantage. Rainbow Six Siege and Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks using the Core i9-12900K were also uploaded by the reviewer.

Though synthetic tests seem to offer perceivable benefits, the real-world advantages in gaming for Alder Lake not seem to be very high at the moment. That being said, we will reserve that judgement once we get to test the 12th gen CPUs with various GPU and memory combinations.

Overall, it looks like we might get to see Alder Lake-S processors finally giving a much needed respite to Intel from the ageing Skylake era. Intel is expected to announce Alder Lake later this month. Meanwhile, Acer has already announced that it will be shipping Alder Lake-based Predator Orion 7000 gaming desktops from Q1 2022.

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