Core i9-13900K Creeps Behind Ryzen 9 7950X In Blender Benchmarks

As tipped by Twitter user HXL, Intel's 13th Generation Raptor Lake CPU lineup is putting up serious numbers against AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series processors in the Blender Benchmark. Intel's Core i7-13700K is competitive against the Ryzen 9 7900X, while the Core i5-13600K leaves the Ryzen 7 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X in the dust.

For the uninitiated, Blender is an open-source content creation tool that can do several different tasks, including 3D rendering, video editing, modeling, animation VFX, and more. As a result, the program can be CPU and GPU-heavy, making it an excellent tool for benchmarking.

At the top of the list is AMD's 16-core behemoth, the Ryzen 9 7950X, spitting out a score of 607.53 points. Underneath the Ryzen 9 7950X sits the 24-core Core i9-13900K at 557.66 points. Then you have the Ryzen 9 7900X at 462.39 points, Core i7-13700K with 429.7 points, Core i5-13600K with 358.18 points, Ryzen 7 7700X with 305.51 points, and Ryzen 5 5600X with 234.65 points.

This Blender benchmark run is exciting to see and shows how potent Intel's hybrid microarchitecture can be right now in the form of Raptor Lake. Based on these numbers alone, we can see that Intel had clawed back much of that multi-core performance it lost to AMD in 2017 when Ryzen first launched.

AMD's Ryzen 9 parts are the only two chips that can beat Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs in Blender's heavy multi-core workload. The Ryzen 9 7950X is 9% faster than the Core i9-13900K, and the Ryzen 9 7900X delivers 7.6% more performance than the Core i7-13700K.

But, even here, the results aren't all that great, considering Intel's pricing strategy. For example, the Core i9-13900K is $50 cheaper than the 7950X, and the Core i7-13700K is a whopping $100 more affordable than the 7900X.

(Note: Technically, Intel's Core i7-13700K results were using an older version of Blender - version 3.2.1, instead of version 3.3 all the rest of the chips are using. But, according to a report by Phoronix, version 3.2.1 features a slower benchmark vs. 3.3, meaning the Core i7-13700K would probably be hair quicker in version 3.3.)

Once we get into the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 parts, Intel completely dominates both parts, with both its Core i7-13700K and Core i5-13600K. The i5-13600K beats the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 5 7600X by a landslide, being 17% and 51% faster, respectively.

It'll be interesting to see how Raptor Lake behaves once we review the architecture in the next several weeks. But it appears like Intel has the potential to win the multi-threaded battle with its latest rendition of its hybrid CPU architecture.