Intel 11th-generation Rocket Lake-S gaming CPUs did not impress us

Today marks the beginning of retail availability for Intel’s 2021 gaming CPU lineup, codenamed Rocket Lake-S. Rocket Lake-S remains to be caught on Intel’s venerable 14 nm course of—we have lengthy since misplaced depend of what number of pluses to tack onto the tip—with options backported from newer 10 nm designs.

Clock pace on Rocket Lake-S stays excessive, however thread counts have decreased on the excessive finish. Overall, most benchmarks present Rocket Lake-S underperforming final 12 months’s Comet Lake—not to mention its actual competitors, coming from AMD Ryzen CPUs.

Our hands-on take a look at outcomes did not appear to match up with Intel’s advertising claims of up to 19 percent gen-on-gen IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle) enchancment over its 10th-generation components.

Multithreaded CPU efficiency

It should not come as an unlimited shock that Core i9-11900Ok underperforms final 12 months’s Core i9-10900Ok in multithreaded assessments—this 12 months’s mannequin solely provides eight cores to final 12 months’s 10. If this half had proven a 19 % enchancment in IPC, that may have come out to a wash—20 % fewer cores, balanced out with 19 % larger IPC.

What we truly noticed was noticeably decreased efficiency throughout the board. Cinebench R20 and Passmark scores are every down about 10 %. Geekbench 5, which tends to attenuate the impression of upper thread counts, reveals an alarming 27 % gen-on-gen efficiency lower.

This 12 months’s Core i5 makes a a lot better exhibiting than its Core i9 huge sibling. In Cinebench R20, the i5-11600Ok virtually catches up with Ryzen 5 5600X, and it simply dominates final 12 months’s Comet Lake i5 equal. It would not come very near its Ryzen competitor in Passmark or Geekbench multithreaded assessments, however it does outpace final 12 months’s mannequin all the best way round.

This represents the clearest, most important generation-on-generation victory we noticed out of Rocket Lake-S.

Single-threaded CPU efficiency

Core i9-11900Ok manages to set new data for single-threaded efficiency—if by razor-thin margins, when in comparison with Ryzen 9. Compared to final 12 months’s Comet Lake i9, these margins are a lot much less skinny.

As at all times, we advise readers not to make an excessive amount of hay of this. Few real-world workloads are genuinely single-threaded, and even the most important margins proven listed below are fairly skinny.

Core i5-11600Ok will get inside a hair’s breadth of Ryzen 5 5600X on single-threaded benchmarks, and it does so whereas scoring considerably extra important victories over final 12 months’s Core i5-10600Ok. For essentially the most half, this is identical relationship we noticed between Rocket Lake-S, Zen 3, and Comet Lake within the earlier Core i9 versus Ryzen 9 slides.

Gaming efficiency

To our shock, 3DMark gaming benchmark Time Spy disapproved of our Rocket Lake-S samples—and did so disproportionately to the outcomes we noticed from extra general-purpose benchmarks Cinebench R20, Passmark, and Geekbench 5. Both Core i9-11900Ok and Core i5-11600Ok got here in at hefty Time Spy disadvantages to their 2020 10th-generation equivalents.

Before you get too alarmed, that is the Time Spy CPU take a look at solely—it focuses on modeling physics in ways in which do not lend themselves to GPU rendering. Assuming that typical video games would see related decreases in total body price can be a grave error. Time Spy Extreme—which permits extra superior processor optimizations and better thread depend—exposes a fair wider hole. (We solely examined Time Spy Extreme on the Core i9.)

As we famous within the gaming-focused Spring 2021 System Guide, the CPU has minimal impression on AAA gaming—body price in most video games is decided virtually solely by GPU. If the solely factor you’ve open in your PC is the sport, you solely want to satisfy a minimal CPU threshold—roughly talking, “2015-era i5 or higher.” However, the extra further duties you load onto your system—browser tabs and e-mail shoppers open within the background or, worst of all, stream-capturing your individual video games—the extra CPU horsepower you may have to preserve issues transferring.

We noticed successfully no change in total Time Spy rating between 10th- and 11th-generation CPUs—and we did not count on to. Yes, the single-threaded efficiency elevated considerably; no, that does not usually have a big impression on gaming efficiency.

Integrated GPU efficiency

Rocket Lake-S will get a small however noticeable improve to its built-in graphics efficiency—the 10th-generation Core CPU’s UHD 630 graphics will get bumped as much as UHD 750. While it’s an enchancment, it is nothing to jot down dwelling about—for those who have been hoping for an equal to Intel’s Iris Xe graphics in Tiger Lake laptop computer CPUs (or AMD’s Vega 11 in desktop APUs) you may be sorely disillusioned.

A modest GeForce GTX 1060 is sweet for a Time Spy Graphics rating of roughly 4,000. Intel’s flagship i7-1185G7 laptop computer CPU manages practically half that at 1572, with AMD’s Vega 11 lagging noticeably behind at 1226. Rocket Lake-S’ UHD 750 is available in at a yawn-inducing 592—rather less than half the efficiency of Vega 11 and a bit greater than one-third the efficiency of Iris Xe.

Although the UHD graphics are sorely underwhelming, we must always level out that they do at the very least exist. Competing Ryzen CPUs within the retail channel provide no built-in graphics in any respect—and with the present provide shortages and ugly value hikes in discrete GPUs, that may imply paying a nasty premium in full-system builds that are not presupposed to give attention to gaming within the first place.