Intel Core i9 14900K and Core i5 14600K review: the definition of iterative

Counter-Strike: GO, Metro Exodus EE and Black Ops Cold War.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on 17 Oct 2023

We've run our CPU benchmarks this time around at 1080p and 1440p, as we rarely see prominent differences at 4K. (There's an argument for testing at 720p to make these deltas even more visible, but even mainstream PC gaming has long since moved onto 1080p.) We're using an Asus RTX 3090 Strix OC graphics card and DDR5-6000 CL30 memory for these results.

Our third page is all about FPS fps, with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The latter two are RT-enabled benchmarks, as creating the BVH structure for ray tracing actually has a significant CPU impact.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike remains the gold standard for competitive FPS, and (running in its Global Offensive legacy branch) is unique amongst our benchmark suite as a DX9 title typically played at hundreds of frames per second. However, competitive-minded players still value high-end CPUs, as guaranteeing a strong and stable frame-rate up to and beyond the refresh rate of their monitors provides a critical boost to responsiveness. As monitors get faster - up to 500Hz these days - CPU requirements continue to climb.

Ryzen processors have historically performed well in CS:GO, but the 14900K narrowly takes the top slot here, with a 398fps average compared to 385fps for the Ryzen 7950X3D. Still, minimum frame-rates are higher on the Ryzen side of the field, so I'd probably go with AMD if Counter-Strike: GO was my game of choice. There's a scant gen-on-gen improvement too, though nothing to write home about.

Counter-Strike 2 has now been released, so expect CS:GO to be replaced in our CPU benchmarks in due course.

CS:GO: DX9, Very High, AF off

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is an RT-only variant of the vanilla game, run here with DLSS engaged to uncouple the GPU and push the strain onto the CPU as much as possible. The test scene we're using comes from the very beginning of The Volga level, with Artyom and Anna discussing their hopes for the future before running into a hostile camp.

Metro Exodus EE is easy to benchmark but often difficult to explain, with lower core-count CPUs outperforming their higher-end counterparts and other occasional weirdness. And so it goes for Intel's 14th-gen parts as well, with the 14900K's full core configuration outperformed by the 14600K to the tune of around four percent. Additionally, the 13900K is slower than the 14900K, but the 13600K is faster - something that persisted in repeated retests. In any case, performance is well in excess of 200fps at these settings, so it's perhaps an academic difference anyway. The 13400F is notably slower at 176fps, while the 7800X3D runs away with the show at nearly 300fps average.

Metro Exodus EE: DX12, Ultra, RTX, DLSS Performance

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War comes next. Here, the focus is less on competitive performance and more on the single-player side of things, as we enable ray tracing and hop into one of the first campaign missions, Fracture Jaw. Interestingly, this mission has RT disabled on consoles, even when the option is enabled elsewhere in the game, suggesting that the BVH building process here is particularly tough. The opening scene, as Bell joins Adler on the fields of Vietnam, is heavy on the CPU at the relatively low graphical settings we've chosen.

This is another game where the 3D V-Cache provides a boost, with the 7950X3D and 7800X3D outperforming the 14900K by five or six percent. Gen-on-gen results are within the margin of error, so there's no real improvement to speak of here.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War: DX12, Low, TAA

We conclude our gaming tests on the next page, where we take on Cyberpunk 2077 and two new editions of Digital Foundry favourites: Far Cry 6 and Crysis 3 Remastered.