The Intel Core i9-9900KS Review: The 5 GHz Consumer Special
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 31, 2019 10:45 AM ESTGaming: Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
235 Comments
View All Comments
Dudler - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
P4 cough cough..Hifihedgehog - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
*cough, cough* Emergency Edition *cough, cough*Man, whatever is going around is really catchy.
Spunjji - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
It's vaguely amusing how they go for the same stock approaches every time. When a product becomes noncompetitive, either release a "special" bin that blows through acceptable power/stability limits, or ram a server CPU down the stack into "consumer" territory. The EE has a special place in my heart because they panicked so hard they did both of those things.Samus - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
And much like the P4 EE, the power consumption is through the roof. Ahh the days of Presshot warming my dorm seeding a Napster queue.You really have to appreciate (again) what AMD is able to pull off here at 65w. It's literally on the heals of a CPU burning 3x more power.
Notmyusualid - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...Death666Angel - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link
All true, but AMD does the same thing, as does Nvidia when it comes to GPUs. Remember the GTX 480? Or the FX-9590. :) If you mess up, that is mostly your only option to have something. Some people don't care much about efficiency and just want the fastest at a certain thing. They probably did the ROI numbers and it came out positive for them.Ratman6161 - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
But...there are still quite a few tests where there is an orange bar at the top :). One thing I'm a bit curious about on the AMD side though is that there are several cases where the 3700X beats the 3900X. 3900X is both more cores and higher clocked so shouldn't it win everywhere?Also for those of us where price is an obejct, that 3700X looks pretty darn good against most everything else. :)
amnesia0287 - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
It’s possible it’s related to the quality of the cores. With the Ryzen chips not all cores have the same limits. So in theory you could have a chip with less total cores but more higher spec’d ones.MDD1963 - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Little need for any 'panic' as, gaming-wise at least, all AMD has managed is to tie the 8700K.....; everything 9700K and higher in the product stack remains virtually unopposed.WaltC - Monday, November 11, 2019 - link
I'm still trying to figure out how a higher clocked Intel CPU which processes data slower than a lower-clocked AMD cpu is a "clear advantage" for Intel....;) Perhaps Dr. Cutress might enlighten me...?....;)