Intel's First-Party Performance Claims

Gaming Performance

Intel claims roughly similar gaming performance to the Core i9-14900K for the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, when averaged along its bench of 12 game tests. In some titles, the company posts performance gains as high as 15%, but in some games, there's also a degradation of 13%. Overall, the gaming performance gins are averaged to +3%, but the key takeaway here is that up to 165 W lower whole-system power draw compared to the i9-14900K machine.


Intel also compared the Core Ultra 285K with AMD's current flagship, the Ryzen 9 9950X, and the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. Against the 9950X, Intel claims that the two chips are mostly on par in its test bench, but in games posing performance gains, the delta can be as high as 28% in Intel's favor, or 13% in AMD's favor.


While the comparison with the 7950X3D isn't as broad, Intel hands the advantage to the 7950X3D, claiming 15% in Intel's favor in some games, or 21% in AMD's favor in others. The 285K predictably beats the 7950X3D in multithreaded productivity benchmarks. In its pre-launch call, Intel admitted that AMD's X3D chips tend to beat it in gaming benchmarks.

Productivity Performance

Productivity is where Intel shines. The IPC gain of "Skymont" E-cores basically makes the 285K a 24-core "P-core" processor by previous-generation performance standards. When compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X, Intel claims a 4% single-threaded performance gain, which goes up to 8% when compared to the i9-14900K.


With multithreaded productivity, Intel claims a 15% performance gain over the i9-14900K, and a 13% gain over the Ryzen 9 9950X, overcoming the thread deficit against both chips.


Performance presents just half the story, the rest of it is the generational energy efficiency gains Intel made with the switch to the 3 nm node and new core architectures.