Questionable leak indicates Rocket Lake-S Core i9-11900K to be 8% to 14% faster than Core i9-10900K in gaming; Core i9 and Core i7 to come in five variants each

Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake-S desktop CPUs are just a few weeks away from launch. We have been seeing a steady flow of leaks and information pertaining to Rocket Lake CPUs, and Anandtech even had a chance to take the Core i7-11700K for an early test drive. Now, alleged slides detailing the Rocket Lake lineup along with some performance comparisons with the Core i9-10900K have leaked on Chinese social media.

The leaked slides list the specifications of 11th gen Core i9 and Core i7 variants but do not show any reference to the Core i5 and Core i3 series. Assuming these slides are true, the Core i9 and Core i7 comes in five variants each — K (fully unlocked, 125 W TDP), KF (fully unlocked, 125 W TDP), non-K (65 W TDP), F (a non-K without an iGPU), and T (reduced base clock, locked boost, and 35 W TDP).

The KF and F parts lack an iGPU, which in this generation is expected to be the UHD Graphics 750 based on the Xe architecture. Since the Core i9-11900T is locked to a 4.9 GHz boost, it does not feature the Thermal Velocity Boost speeds offered by the other Core i9 variants.

During CES 2021, Intel compared the gaming performance of the Core i9-11900K with the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and claimed an edge over the latter, though it wasn't really that significant. In the leaked slides, however, we see a comparison with the Comet Lake Core i9-10900K wherein we see the Core i9-11900K showing a 14% higher performance than its Comet Lake predecessor in Microsoft Flight Simulator at 1080p High.

Similarly, gains of up to 13% in Total War: Three Kingdoms, 9% in Gears 5, and 8% in GRID 2019 are also shown. However, the catch here is that the slides do not mention the metrics being compared. It is mostly likely the average FPS, but frametimes, load times, or 99th percentile FPS are possible as well.

While these slides seem to be believable, we do see a lack of pricing information for the SKUs and lack of proper metrics in the gaming comparison. Besides, they seem to use the older Intel presentation design, which could either imply they are fake or that they were made before Intel changed its marketing material typeface.

We will know more about Rocket Lake-S in the days to come, but its success would largely depend on pricing and availability as AMD's Zen 3 still has the upper hand when it comes to raw multi-core performance.