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Intel Raptor Lake CPUs will launch October 20 with prices largely to match 12th Gen

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Intel's next-gen Raptor Lake CPUs are headed to our gaming PCs on October 20. The first chips to arrive from the 13th Gen will be K-series chips, favoured by us PC gamers for our gaming machines,
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Intel’s next-gen Raptor Lake CPUs are headed to our gaming PCs on October 20. The first chips to arrive from the 13th Gen will be K-series chips, favoured by us PC gamers for our gaming machines, and we have high hopes for what they might offer. We already know to expect a significant uplift in both single-threaded and multithreaded performance but Intel has now offered further explanation as to how it hopes to give AMD’s recently released Zen 4 processors a run for their money.
At launch, six 13th Gen processors will be available: Core i9 13900K, Core i9 13900KF, Core i7 13700K, Core i7 13700KF, Core i5 13600K, and Core i5 13600KF.
The ‘K’ chips come with onboard graphics, Intel’s UHD Graphics 770, and slightly higher recommended retail price tags ($25 more) than the graphics-less ‘KF’ versions.
We’ve heard a lot about these new processors over the past few months, so let’s say none of what I’m about to tell you will come as a complete surprise. Although I have been able to speak with a few key folks over at Intel about the upcoming 13th Gen architecture/CPUs, and there are some less talked about improvements that might be of interest to the budding PC gamer.
First off, Intel is promising a varied uplift in gaming performance over its last-gen Alder Lake processors. Somewhere between an impressive 1.2X improvement in games such as League of Legends (opens in new tab) or Rainbow Six: Siege (opens in new tab) through to generally higher fps in most titles tested internally by the company. With gaming workloads preferring single-threaded performance, and Intel touting up to a 15% increase there, these benchmarks fall roughly in line with our expectations.
However, Intel does also note a slight decrease in performance in games like Horizon Zero Dawn (opens in new tab) and Metro Exodu (opens in new tab)s.
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(Image credit: Intel)
(Image credit: Intel)
(Image credit: Intel)
I had a chance to chat to Marcus Kennedy, general manager of gaming, creator, and esports, ahead of the Intel Innovation event and asked him why we’re seeing that dip, and he largely chalked it up to game releases and updates perhaps not playing as nicely with the increase in Efficient-cores (E-cores) on these new 13th Gen new processors. He also cited potential bugs or simple benchmarking variance as potential causes.
“If you looked at that same graph when we got our A0 silicon 13th generation (early test sample), it was way more all the way to the left. We expect, by and large, that games will all take advantage of the increased performance and increased cores, faster frequency, all of that, without seeing regression.”
We’ll be getting these chips in for review and Metro Exodus is in our benchmarking suite, so we’ll be able to test this for ourselves soon enough, anyways.
We know that there’s a tonne of headroom in these bad boys.Marcus Kennedy
Generally, it appears as though Intel will manage to sustain top gaming performance ahead of AMD’s Zen 4 processors with the 13th Gen. Again, it’s something we need to test for ourselves, but seeing as neither the Ryzen 9 7950X (opens in new tab) or Ryzen 7 7700X (opens in new tab) managed to break Intel’s Core i9 12900K (opens in new tab) in gaming in our reviews of those two chips, there’s no real question that the faster 13900K will manage the same, too.
Though it’s worth mentioning we have no direct comparison from Intel yet, as its benchmarks above were carried out using AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X and not its latest lineup (which weren’t out at the time).
Kennedy also tells me Intel expects zero issues with game compatibility on Raptor Lake on release, as those issues have been all patched out since Alder Lake’s release with the hybrid architecture in tow.

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