New week, new leak, as an engineer sample of Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake based Core i9-13900K has appeared in the infamous Geekbench database. It seems to be one of the ES samples that has been making the rounds over the past few weeks, but this is the first time we get an indication of what the performance might be like. There are no real surprises in terms of the specifications, we're looking at a base clock of 3 GHz, with a boost clock of 5.5 GHz, which has already been reported for these chips. The 24-core, 32-thread CPU was paired with 32 GB of 6400 MHz DDR5 memory and an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard. Unfortunately the test results are reported as invalid, due to "an issue with the timers" on the system.

That said, we can still compare the results with a similar system using a Core i9-12900K on an ASUS ROG Strix Z690-F Gaming board, that's also paired up with 32 GB of 6400 MHz DDR5 memory. The older Alder Lake system is actually somewhat faster in the single core tests where it scores 2,142 points versus 2133 points for the Raptor Lake based system, despite having a maximum frequency of 5.1 GHz. The Raptor Lake system is faster in the multi-core test at 23,701 vs. 21312 points. However, it's no point doing any kind of analysis here, as the Raptor Lake results are all over the place, with it beating the Alder Lake CPU by a significant amount in some tests and losing against it in others, where it shouldn't be falling behind, simply based on the higher clock speed and additional power efficient cores. At least this shows that Raptor Lake is running largely as intended on current 600-series motherboards, so for those considering upgrading to the 13th gen of Intel CPUs, there shouldn't be any big hurdles to overcome.

The Exynos 2200 SoC powering the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra in some regions such as the EU, posts some less-than-stellar graphics performance numbers, for all the hype around its AMD-sourced RDNA2 graphics solution, according to an investigative report by Erdi Özüağ, aka "FX57." Samsung brands this RDNA2-based GPU as the Samsung Xclipse 920. Further, Özüağ's testing found that the Exynos 2200 is considerably slower than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 powering the S22 Ultra in certain other regions, including the US and India. He has access to both kinds of the S22 Ultra.

In the UL Benchmarks 3DMark Wildlife test, the Exynos 2200 posted a score of 6684 points, compared to 9548 points by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (a difference of 42 percent). What's even more interesting, is that the Exynos 2200 is barely 7 percent faster than the previous-gen Exynos 2100 (Arm Mali GPU) powering the S21 Ultra, which scored 6256 points. The story repeats with the GFXBench "Manhattan" off-screen render benchmark. Here, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is 30 percent faster than the Exynos 2200, which performs on-par with the Exynos 2100. Find a plethora of other results in the complete review comparing the two flavors of the S22 Ultra.

Remember those early developer units of the Steam Deck that Valve was shipping out to developers? Well, one of them ended up in the hands of someone in China, who decided to share a few benchmarks on a local forum. Judging by the pictures posted, Valve still has a lot of work to do when it comes to the translation of the UI, but this shouldn't affect anyone using it in English.

The hardware appears to function according to the announced specs, so there were no surprises here, good or bad. Only four games were tested, which consists of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Doom, Cyberpunk 2077 and DOTA 2. Let's just say that Cyberpunk 2077 isn't going to be what you want to play on the Steam Deck, as it was fluctuating between 20 to 30 FPS, although this was at the high quality setting.

We recently saw the Intel Core i7-12700 appear on Geekbench 5 where it traded blows with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, we have now discovered the flagship Core i9-12900K also making an appearance. The benchmarked Intel Core i9-12900K features a hybrid design with 8 high-performance cores, 8 high-efficiency cores, and 24 threads running at a base clock of 3.2 GHz. The test was performed on a Windows 11 Pro machine allowing for full use of the Intel Thread Director technology paired with 32 GB of DDR5 memory. The processor achieved a single-core score of 1834/1893 in the two tests which gives it the highest score on the official Benchmarks coming in 12% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X. The processor also achieved an impressive multi-core score of 17299/17370 which places it 3% above the Ryzen 9 5950X and 57% above the previous generation flagship 8-core i9-11900K. These leaked benchmarks highlight the impressive potential of Intel's upcoming 12th Generation Core series which is expected to launch in November.

UL Benchmarks is expanding 3DMark today by adding a set of dedicated CPU benchmarks. The 3DMark CPU Profile introduces a new approach to CPU benchmarking that shows how CPU performance scales with the number of cores and threads used. The new CPU Profile benchmark tests are available now in 3DMark Advanced Edition and 3DMark Professional Edition.

The 3DMark CPU Profile introduces a new approach to CPU benchmarking. Instead of producing a single number, the 3DMark CPU Profile shows how CPU performance scales and changes with the number of cores and threads used. The CPU Profile has six tests, each of which uses a different number of threads. The benchmark starts by using all available threads. It then repeats using 16 threads, 8 threads, 4 threads, 2 threads, and ends with a single-threaded test. These six tests help you benchmark and compare CPU performance for a range of threading levels. They also provide a better way to compare different CPU models by looking at the results from thread levels they have in common.

Blizzard, a popular game developer, has today implemented NVIDIA's latest technology for latency reduction into its first-person shooter—Overwatch. Called NVIDIA Reflex, the technology aims to reduce system latency by combining the NVIDIA GPUs with G-SYNC monitors, and specially certified peripherals, all of which can be found on the company website. NVIDIA Reflex dynamically reduces system latency by combining both GPU and game optimizations, which game developers implement, and the gamer is left with a much more responsive system that can edge out a competitive advantage. Today, we get to see just how much the new technology helps in the latest Overwatch update that brings NVIDIA's Reflex with it.

Blizzard has tested three NVIDIA GPUs: GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 2060 SUPER, and GTX 1660 SUPER. All three GPUs cover three different segments, so they are a good sign of what you can expect from your system. Starting from the GeForce GTX 1660 Super, the system latency, which was measured in milliseconds, was cut by over 50%. The middle-end RTX 2060 SUPER GPU experienced a similar gain, while the RTX 3080 was seen with the smallest gain, however, it did achieve the lowest latency out of all GPUs tested. You can check out the results for yourself below.

Over the last year, we've seen a lot of interest in a new category of PCs designed for content creators. With high-end specifications and serious styling, these new creator PCs are being marketed to animators, designers, photographers, videographers, musicians and other digital content creators. Today, to meet growing demand from our press and retail partners, we're releasing two new benchmarks for measuring the performance of creator PCs. These two benchmarks use popular Adobe applications to test PC performance for photo editing and video editing work.

Enthusiast creators now have easy access to many of the same software tools used by professionals. Add increasingly powerful, yet affordable PC hardware, and creators have everything they need to develop their talent and unlock their potential. For creators who make a living from their craft, focus and productivity are key. When the process gets in the way, creativity suffers. Even the smallest interruption can break the flow. Longer delays from loading images or exporting video files are even more frustrating. Creator PCs promise to smooth out the wrinkles in the production process. Many manufacturers are now offering dedicated systems for content creators. Benchmark scores offer an easy way for creators to compare the performance of these different systems.

The launch of AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards on November 18 will end NVIDIA's monopoly on real-time raytracing. For the first time, gamers will have a choice of GPU vendors when buying a raytracing-capable graphics card. Today, we're releasing a new 3DMark feature test that measures pure raytracing performance. You can use the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test to compare the performance of the dedicated raytracing hardware in the latest graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA.

Real-time raytracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that's optimized for raytracing operations. Despite the advances in GPU performance, the demands are still too high for a game to rely on raytracing alone. That's why games use raytracing to complement traditional rendering techniques. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test is designed to make raytracing performance the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass.DOWNLOAD: 3DMark v2.15.7078

Intel CEO Bob Swan, in his Virtual Computex YouTube stream, advocated that the industry should focus less on benchmarks, and more on the benefits of technology, a line of thought strongly advocated by rival AMD in its pre-Ryzen era, before the company began getting competitive with Intel again. "We should see this moment as an opportunity to shift our focus as an industry from benchmarks to the benefits and impacts of the technology we create," he said, referring to technology keeping civilization and economies afloat during the COVID-19 global pandemic, which has thrown Computex among practically every other public gathering out of order.

"The pandemic has underscored the need for technology to be purpose-built so it can meet these evolving business and consumer needs. And this requires a customer-obsessed mindset to stay close, anticipate those needs, and develop solutions. In this mindset, the goal is to ensure we are optimizing for a stronger impact that will support and accelerate positive business and societal benefits around the globe," he added. An example of what Swan is trying to say is visible with Intel's 10th generation Core "Cascade Lake XE" and "Ice Lake" processors, which feature AVX-512 and DL-Boost, accelerating deep learning neural nets; but lose to AMD's flagship offerings on the vast majority of benchmarks. Swan also confirmed that the company's "Tiger Lake" processors will launch this Summer.The Computex video address by CEO Bob Swan can be watched below.

Renowned leaker APISAK has digged up benchmarks for AMD's upcoming Ryzen 4700G, 4400G and 4200G Renoir APUs in 3D Mark. These are actually for the PRO versions of the APUs, but these tend to be directly comparable with AMD's non-PRO offerings, so we can look at them to get an idea of where AMD's 4000G series' performance lies. AMD's 4000G will be increasing core-counts almost across the board - the midrange 4400G now sports 6 cores and 12 threads, which is more than the previous generation Ryzen 5 3400G offered (4 cores / 8 threads), while the top-of-the-line 4700G doubles the 3400G's core-cpount to 8 physical and 16 logical threads.

This increase in CPU cores, of course, has implied a reduction in the area of the chip that's dedicated to the integrated Vega graphics GPU - compute units have been reduced from the 3400G's 11 down to 8 compute units on the Ryzen 7 4700G and 7 compute units on the 4400G - while the 4200G now makes do with just 6 Vega compute units. Clocks have been severely increased across the board to compensate the CU reduction, though - the aim is to achieve similar GPU performance using a smaller amount of semiconductor real-estate.

Benchmarks for one of the recently announced 10th generation Intel Core chips have been leaked early by Chinese review channel Bilibili as reported by @Momomo_US. The mid-range Intel Core i5-10400 is a new 6 core/12 thread CPU with a base clock of 2.9 GHz and a max all core boost of 4.0 GHz with a recommended customer price of $182. The Core i5-10400 was put up against the current-gen Core i5-9400F and Core i7-9700F in a variety of games by Bilibili with the i5-10400 matching or beating the i7-9700F in most tests.

The Intel Core i7-9700F is an 8 core/8 thread CPU that was released in 2019 with a recommended customer price of $310 which it still retails for today. To see the i5-10400 match the i7-9700F is significant news for gamers as Intel is forced to lower prices and increase performance as the threat of Ryzen 3000 looms. The CPU was tested in Grand Theft Auto V and Assassins Creed Odyssey at 1080p where the i5-10400 came ahead in Assassins Creed Odyssey and just behind the i7-9700F in Grand Theft Auto V. The full results can be viewed below.

Intel is taking big strides forward with its Gen11 integrated graphics architecture. Its performance-configured variant, the Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7, featured in the Core i7-1065G7 "Ice Lake" processor, is found to beat AMD Radeon RX Vega 10 iGPU, found in the Ryzen 7 2700U processor ("Raven Ridge"), by as much as 16 percent in 3DMark 11, a staggering 23 percent in 3DMark FireStrike 1080p. Notebook Check put the two iGPUs through these, and a few game tests to derive an initial verdict that Intel's iGPU has caught up with AMD's RX Vega 10. AMD has since updated its iGPU incrementally with the "Picasso" silicon, providing it with higher clock speeds and updated display and multimedia engines.

The machines tested here are the Lenovo Ideapad S540-14API for the AMD chip, and Lenovo Yoga C940-14IIL with the i7-1065G7. The Iris Plus G7 packs 64 Gen11 execution units, while the Radeon RX Vega 10 has 640 stream processors based on the "Vega" architecture. Over in the gaming performance, and we see the Intel iGPU 2 percent faster than the RX Vega 10 at Bioshock Infinite at 1080p, 12 percent slower at Dota 2 Reborn 1080p, and 8 percent faster at XPlane 11.11.

GIGABYTE, a leading server systems builder which recently released a total of 17 new AMD EPYC 7002 Series "Rome" server platforms simultaneously with AMD's own official launch of their next generation CPU, is proud to announce that our new systems have already broken 11 different SPEC benchmark world records. These new world records have not only been achieved against results from all alternative processor based systems but even against competing vendor solutions using the same 2nd Generation AMD EPYC 7002 Series "Rome" processor platform, illustrating that GIGABYTE's system design and engineering is perfectly optimized to deliver the maximum performance possible from the 2nd Generation AMD EPYC.

UL Benchmarks via its 3DMark product have announced that they'll be introducing a new, comprehensive test that aims to test PCIe bandwidth across generations. Citing the introduction of PCIe 4.0 to the masses - soon available in the consumer market via AMD's Ryzen 3000 series release - UL wants users to be able to know what a difference this makes towards allowing for more complex games and scenarios that aren't data-constrained by PCIe 3.0.

The 3D Mark PCIe Performance Test will be made available this summer for free for 3DMark Advanced Edition and for 3DMark Professional Edition customers with a valid annual license.

Intel Tuesday once again shook the IT world by disclosing severe microarchitecture-level security vulnerabilities affecting its processors. The Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) class of vulnerabilities affect Intel CPU architectures older than "Coffee Lake" to a greater extent. Among other forms of mitigation software patches, Intel is recommending that users disable HyperThreading technology (HTT), Intel's simultaneous multithreading (SMT) implementation. This would significantly deplete multi-threaded performance on older processors with lower core-counts, particularly Core i3 2-core/4-thread chips.

On "safer" microarchitectures such as "Coffee Lake," though, Intel is expecting a minimal impact of software patches, and doesn't see any negative impact of disabling HTT. This may have something to do with the 50-100 percent increased core-counts with the 8th and 9th generations. The company put out a selection of benchmarks relevant to client and enterprise (data-center) use-cases. On the client use-case that's we're more interested in, a Core i9-9900K machine with software mitigation and HTT disabled is negligibly slower (within 2 percent) of a machine without mitigation and HTT enabled. Intel's selection of benchmarks include SYSMark 2014 SE, WebXprt 3, SPECInt rate base (1 copy and n copies), and 3DMark "Skydiver" with the chip's integrated UHD 630 graphics. Comparing machines with mitigations applied but toggling HTT presents a slightly different story.

UL Corporation today announces that two new benchmark tests that will soon be coming to PCMark 10. The first is our eagerly awaited PCMark 10 battery life benchmark. The second is a new benchmark test based on Microsoft Office applications.

PCMark 10 Battery Life benchmark
Battery life is one of the most important criteria for choosing a laptop, but consumers and businesses alike find it hard to compare systems fairly. The challenge, of course, is that battery life depends on how the device is used. Unfortunately, manufacturers' claims are often based on unrealistic scenarios that don't reflect typical use. Figures for practical, day-to-day battery life, which are usually much lower, are rarely available.

NVIDIA's upcoming "Turing" based GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card could carve itself a value proposition between the $250-300 mark that lets it coexist with both the GTX 1060 6 GB and the $350 RTX 2060, according to leaked "Final Fantasy XV" benchmarks scored by VideoCardz. In these benchmarks, the GTX 1660 Ti was found to perform roughly on par with the previous-generation GTX 1070 (non-Ti), which is plausible given that the 1,536 CUDA cores based on "Turing," architecture, with their higher IPC and higher GPU clocks, are likely to catch up with the 1,920 "Pascal" CUDA cores of the GTX 1070, while 12 Gbps 192-bit GDDR6 serves up more memory bandwidth than 8 Gbps 256-bit GDDR5 (288 GB/s vs. 256 GB/s). The GTX 1070 scores in memory size, with 8 GB of it. NVIDIA is expected to launch the GTX 1660 Ti later this month at USD $279. Unlike the RTX 20-series, these chips lack NVIDIA RTX real-time raytracing technology, and DLSS (deep-learning supersampling).

Perhaps gliding through the tech-infused CES week, UL Corporation has just announced that the much-expected Port Royal, the world's first dedicated real-time ray tracing benchmark for gamers, is now available. Port Royal uses DirectX Raytracing to enhance reflections, shadows, and other effects that are difficult to achieve with traditional rendering techniques, and enables both performance benchmarking for cutthroat competition throughout the internet (and our own TPU forums, of course), but is also an example of what to expect from ray tracing in upcoming games - ray tracing effects running in real-time at reasonable frame rates at 2560 × 1440 resolution.

Port Royal is the name of the latest component of UL Benchmarks 3DMark. Designed to take advantage of the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, this benchmark features an extreme poly-count test-scene with real-time ray-traced elements. Screengrabs of the benchmark depict spacecraft entering and leaving mirrored spheres suspended within a planet's atmosphere, which appear to be docks. It's also a shout out to of a number of space-sims such as "Star Citizen," which could up their production in the future by introducing ray-tracing. The benchmark will debut at the GALAX GOC Grand Final on December 8, where the first public run will be powered by a GALAX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti HOF graphics card. It will start selling in January 2019.

NVIDIA released comparison benchmarks for its new AI-accelerated DLSS technology, which is part of their new Turing architecture's call to fame. Using the Infiltrator benchmark with its stunning real-time graphics, NVIDIA showcased the performance benefits of using DLSS-improved 4K rendering instead of the usual 4K rendering + TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing). Using a Core i9-7900X 3.3GHz CPU paired with 16 GB of Corsair DDR4 memory, Windows 10 (v1803) 64-bit, and version 416.25 of the NVIDIA drivers, the company showed tremendous performance improvements that can be achieved with the pairing of both Turing's architecture strengths and the prowess of DLSS in putting Tensor cores to use in service of more typical graphics processing workloads.

The results speak for themselves: with DLSS at 4K resolution, the upcoming NVIDIA RTX 2070 convincingly beats its previous-gen pair by doubling performance. Under these particular conditions, the new king of the hill, the RTX 2080 Ti, convincingly beats the previous gen's halo product in the form of the Titan Xp, with a 41% performance lead - but so does the new RTX 2070, which is being sold at half the asking price of the original Titan Xp.

At its 9th Generation Core processor launch extravaganza earlier this week, Intel posted benchmark numbers to show just how superior its processors are to AMD 2nd generation Ryzen "Pinnacle Ridge." PC enthusiasts worth their salt were quick to point out that Intel's numbers are both flawed and misleading as they misrepresent both test setups - by optimizing Intel processors beyond their out-of-the-box performance, and by running AMD processors with sub-optimal settings.

Intel paid Principled Technologies, a third-party performance testing agency, to obtain performance numbers comparing the Core i9-9900K with the Ryzen 7 2700X across a spectrum of gaming benchmarks, instead of testing the two chips internally, and posting their test setup data in end-notes, as if to add a layer of credibility/deniability to their charade. The agency posted its numbers that were almost simultaneously re-posted PCGamesN, gleaming the headline "Up to 50% Faster than Ryzen at Gaming." You could fertilize the Sahara with this data.

UL Benchmarks de-listed several popular Huawei devices from its database over proof of cheating in its benchmarks. Over the month, it was found that several of Huawei's devices, such as P20 Pro, Nova 3, and Play; overclocked their SoCs while ignoring all power and thermal limits, to achieve high benchmark scores, when it detected that a popular benchmark such as 3DMark, was being run. To bust this, UL Benchmarks tested the three devices with "cloaked" benchmarks, or "private benchmarks" as they call it. These apps are identical in almost every way to 3DMark, but lack the identification or branding that lets Huawei devices know when to overclock themselves to cheat the test.

The results were startling. When the devices have no clue that a popular benchmark is being run (or if has no way of telling that 3DMark is being run), it chugs along at its "normal" speed, which is 35% to 36% lower. The rules that bind device manufacturers from advertising UL's 3DMark scores explicitly state that the device must not detect the app and optimize its hardware on the fly to ace the test. Huawei responded to UL by stating that it will unlock a new "performance mode" to users that lets them elevate their SoCs to the same high clocks for any application.

NVIDIA today released their first official performance numbers for their new generation of GeForce products - particularly, the RTX 2080. The RTX 20 series of graphics cards, according to the company, offers some 50% performance improvements (on average) on architectural improvements alone, in a per-core basis. This number is then built upon with the added RTX performance of the new RT cores, which allows the RTX 2080 to increase its performance advantage over the last generation 1080 by up to 2x more - while using the new DLSS technology. PUBG, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Final Fantasy XV are seeing around 75 percent or more improved performance when using this tech.

NVIDIA is also touting the newfound ability to run games at 4K resolutions at over 60 FPS performance, making the RTX 2080 the card to get if that's your preferred resolution (especially if paired with one of those dazzling OLED TVs...) Of course, IQ settings aren't revealed in the slides, so there's an important piece of the puzzle still missing. But considering performance claims of NVIDIA, and comparing the achievable performance on last generation hardware, it's fair to say that these FPS scores refer to the high or highest IQ settings for each game.

Futuremark set a date for its re-branding to align with its parent company UL. April 23, 2018 is when Futuremark products and services will be sold under the new branding scheme. Futuremark became part of UL in 2014. UL is an independent, global company with more than 10,000 professionals in 40 countries. UL offers a wide range of testing, inspection, auditing, and certification services and solutions to help customers, purchasers and policymakers manage risk and complexity in modern markets. A set of FAQs associated with the change are answered below.

It's safe to say that there's one thing that you don't mess around with, and that's performance. Enthusiasts don't spend hundreds of dollars on a processor to watch it underperform. Given the complicated nature of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, Microsoft's so-called mitigations were bound to have an impact on processor performance. The million dollar question was: Just how much? The initial estimate was somewhere around 30%, but Intel, being optimistic as usual, expected the performance impact to be insignificant for the average user. They recently provided some preliminary benchmark results that looked quite convincing too. Well, let's take a look at their findings, shall we?

Intel measured the mitgations' impact on CPU performance using their 6th, 7th, and 8th Generation Intel Core processors but, more specifically, the i7-6700K, i7-7920HQ, i7-8650U, and i7-8700K. The preferred operating system used in the majority of the benchmarks was Windows 10, however, Windows 7 also made a brief appearance. Intel chose four key benchmarks for their testing. SYSmark 2014 SE evaluated CPU performance on an enterprise level simulating office productivity, data and financial analysis, and media creation. PC Mark 10, on the other hand, tested performance in real-world usage employing different workloads like web browsing, video conferencing, application start-up time, spreadsheets, writing, and digital content creation. 3DMark Sky Diver assessed CPU performance in a DirectX 11 gaming scenario. Lastly, WebXPRT 2015 measured system performance using six HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads which include photo enhancement, organize album, stock option pricing, local notes, sales graphs, and explore DNA sequencing.