Intel 14th Gen CPUs Tested In Factorio, Get Crushed By AMD Ryzen 7000X3D & 5000X3D Chips

13.10.2023 - 16:49 / wccftech.com / Per II (Ii)

Intel's upcoming 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs have been tested in the Factoio, a top-down sim builder game but the performance lacks severely against AMD's Ryzen 3D V-Cache chips.

The benchmarks come from folks over at Computerbase who have compiled the numbers for various chips including Intel 14th Gen CPUs, 13th Gen CPUs, and AMD Ryzen 7000, Ryzen 5000 3D V-Cache chips. The 14th Gen chips include the Core i91-4900K, Core i7-14700K & Core i5-14600K. All of these CPUs are expected to launch next week and we know pretty much everything there is about these chips, in fact, they are already being sold to customers ahead of launch as reported here.

Coming to the benchmarks, Factorio isn't at all a very graphics or CPU-intensive title & mostly has a 2D look to it with certain 3D elements. With that said, the game uses a metric known as UPS, or Updates Per Second which essentially determines how fast a processor can run calculations. The higher the UPS, the faster your factories will be able to run in real-life seconds compared to a lower UPS rate.

So in terms of performance, the 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh Desktop CPUs seem to offer a very minuscule upgrade over the 13th Gen chips. The Core i9-14900K ends up +3.7% faster than the i9-13900K, the Core i7-14700K ends up +6.8% faster than the i7-13700K while the Core i5-14600K ends up +1.2% faster than the i5-13600K. But the outlet also compared the chips against the AMD Ryzen 7000 & Ryzen 5000 3D V-Cache chips and it's an onslaught.

The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D ends up being 63% faster than the Intel Core i9-14900K, the fastest 14th Gen CPU, while the Ryzen 7 5800X3D ends up being 23% faster than the 14th Gen flagship. This is a massive performance difference and one possibility of such as huge performance difference can be due to the 3D V-Cache technology that this game might benefit from. There are no non-D 3D V-Cache chips compared here so we can't say for sure if it's the 3D V-Cache tech that's offering this uplift or if it's something else. A general optimization towards AMD CPUs may also be the case but there is no specific mention by Factorio devs to have optimized a certain vendor's CPUs.

Official Intel slides have shown an average +2.56% performance difference between the Core i9-14900K and the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. These results were compiled through various games with the 14900K beating the 7950X3D by up to +23% and also losing to it by around -23%. In reality, the i9-14900K will end up being pretty much the same as the 13900K but with some improvements in applications that benefit from higher clock speeds.