The Intel Core i9-12900KS Review: The Best of Intel's Alder Lake, and the Hottest

CPU Benchmark Performance: Simulation And Rendering

Simulation and Science have a lot of overlap in the benchmarking world, however for this distinction we’re separating into two segments mostly based on the utility of the resulting data. The benchmarks that fall under Science have a distinct use for the data they output – in our Simulation section, these act more like synthetics but at some level are still trying to simulate a given environment.

We are using DDR5 memory at the following settings:

• DDR5-4800(B) CL40

Simulation

When it comes to simulation, the higher core clock speeds of the Core i9-12900KS didn't make any effect in our Factorio benchmark, which AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 3D V-Cache gives a more effective boost to performance. In our Dolphin test, the Core i9-12900KS was quicker by around 7-8%, and in our Dwarf Fortress benchmark, the Core i9-12900KS was better than the K, but not as good as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

Rendering

Focusing on rendering performance, the results between the Core i9-12900KS and Core i9-12900K are consistently close. In single-threaded benchmarks such as CineBench R23, we saw impressive performance in comparison to other chips on test, with a 7% jump in R23 single thread performance over the Core i9-12900K.

The multi-threaded performance though between the two Intel 12th Gen Core i9 chips wasn't much difference, but there's a clear advantage in single-thread performance when rendering. It's worth pointing out that rendering is typically a multi-threaded workload.