8700K vs 9700K for gaming?

[Gerr]

While nothing has been confirmed yet, leaks say the 9700K will be an 8c8t CPU while we know the 8700K is a 6c12t CPU.  If both are overclocked to an all-core turbo-boost of 5.0Ghz, and presuming the leaks are correct, which CPU would preform better in games?  Basically, if everything else is the same, would a 6c12t CPU or a 8c8t CPU be faster at games in general.  And for augments sake, lets say you run a 1440p@144Hz monitor off a 1080Ti and play current AAA games.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Neither, since I don't have reason to believe that games can fully utilize more than 6 cores at the moment (except for AotS and Civilization). But if you wanted something that'll last longer, then the theoretical i7-9700K should last longer because physical cores tend to perform better than having more logical processors for games.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

I'd get the 8700K because overclocking will be easier on two fewer cores and games can't use all 8 cores anyway

[Jurrunio]

If games do use 8 cores, then 9700k will win. hyperthreading doesmt work as well as real cores in games

[Princess Luna]

The i7 8700K will probably be better for years to come, games do benefit from Hyper-Threading it is idiotic say it doesn't specially if you have any thing running alongside the game as it will ensure stability on your minimums (1%/0.1% lows) which is more important than averages.

 

Reason why is simply because Intel's Ring Bus performance scaling reaches its peak at 6 cores configuration, Ring Bus extreme low latency is right now attribute as the main reason for Intel reaching much superior gaming performance than AMD as Infinity Fabric still has considerable more latency even when you 'fix' it with 3200mhz + memory.

 

Having that in mind the 8 cores Intel (8 cores being the maximum it can use Ring Bus before it starts actually damaging performance and making need of going with Mesh instead) will have higher latency between its cores.

 

No game is realistically optimized to make use of 8 cores yet and it ain't realistic to even be when considering how hard is paralleling with current game engines, the greatest majority sees its peak enjoyment at the 4c/8t configuration making the 6c/12t still the best alternative since it provides the full potential use of the game and still leaves you with 2 cores (4 threads) for the OS and secondary stuff running during your game.

 

If any thing disregarding Ring Bus situation currently and for the near future, both the i7 8700K and i7 9700K would be identical in gaming potential which is already what we see true with the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X, gaming solely there is no real gain in 'raw fps' having extra 2 cores/4threads, 9th gen will still be 14nm++ just like 8th gen.

 

The benefits will always lay in specific usages, application that will use more multi-threading, more expressive multi-tasking and so on.

[DarkSmith2]

We may see slight density increase with 8.5gen though. Not impossible that the 9900k will beat the 8700k in gaming, well hence higher clockspeeds out of the box it will anyway, but we can also hope for higher /more consistent overclocks (8086k alike) but probably hard to cool. 

[Mr. PC]

If the 9700k can turbo up to 5GHz without overclock then you should be able to get more out of it

[dizmo]

I'm going to go with wait and see, because we don't actually know what will be released, or the performance of said chips.

It's all guessing for now.

[Gerr]

My question was more of 6c12t vs 8c8t if running at the same speed.

[porina]

11 minutes ago, Gerr said:

My question was more of 6c12t vs 8c8t if running at the same speed.

It really depends on how the software uses it. In terms of execution potential, HT typically gives 0-50% throughput boost compared to not having it. So in that sense, a 6 core CPU with HT could behave like a 6 to 9 core CPU without HT depending on the software. You really do have to work it out per application how HT scales for it. I'd put the 8c8t as the safer option as it'll be more predictable in performance. Worst case on 6c12t, if OS scheduling does poorly, it could put two heavy threads on the same core and you lose performance while they fight it out.

[wildgg]

i don't think you're going to notice much of difference

especially at 1440p

[Phentos]

I personally think the difference will be negligible unless you care about what your FPS monitor is showing at all times. 

 

Same thing could be said about the 9900K vs the 8700K IMO. Unnoticeable unless you have OCD about FPS numbers.

[epsilon84]

Though one to predict which will come out on top clock for clock, but my vote would be on the 8/8 9700K, but only just. Reason being, some games still show some form of HT penalty it seems, albeit a small one. Thats why occasionally you get those weird game benchmarks where a 8600K beats a 8700K slightly. Also, since most games don't really scale beyond 8 threads, you would think the greater amount of physical processors would win out over the extra logical processors which would be largely unused anyway.

 

That being said, the differences would be really small, negligible in fact. I definitely wouldn't 'upgrade' from a 8700K to a 9700K, that's for sure.