Threadripper vs. Core i9: What’s the best CPU for game developers?

Modern 3D games represent one of the most hardware-intensive tasks you can throw at a PC. Naturally, you’re gonna want the most powerful hardware you can get to play these games.

So, whose top-of-the-line desktop CPU does it better: AMD’s Threadripper or Intel’s Core i9? Gordon Ung and Will Smith are here to answer that in the latest PCWorld YouTube video.

For this test, we’re pitting a Falcon Northwest Talon desktop with a 64-core AMD Threadripper 7980X, generously provided by the video’s sponsor, against a custom-built Intel machine with a Core i9-14900KS.

Both of these desktops are absolutely top-of-the-line for current CPUs, and both are filled with nearly identical parts (aside from their CPU and motherboard), which include a Crucial T705 Gen5 SSD and an RTX 4090 graphics card. The only big difference is that the Intel machine gets 48GB of Patriot Viper Elite 5 DDR5 RAM while the AMD machine gets 128GB of Kingston DDR5 (slower, but with more lanes).

It’d be easy enough to put both of these monsters through a bunch of benchmarks to see which one can crunch more raw numbers. But that wouldn’t tell the whole story.

We’re comparing an Intel machine made with consumer-grade parts (one that’s very much intended for playing high-end games) versus a Falcon Northwest that’s built for developing high-end games.

As a former game developer, Will knows a bit about this—and he has insight as to what you want for heavy computing tasks. Creating lightmaps and compiling code can eat up a lot of time that game developers otherwise spend twiddling their thumbs.

To help realistically test these tasks, Will created a custom map in the Unreal 5 engine and threw the various compute times at both machines. These are common, intensive tasks that basically render your machine useless for anything else while they’re executing.

For these Unreal Engine tasks, the Threadripper absolutely owned the Core i9, beating out the custom-built desktop with a compute time of 20 minutes to 31 minutes (a time factor of approximately 50 percent).

Hardly surprising, since the AMD machine is using 64 cores while the Core i9 has 24 split between performance and efficiency, and these development tools are optimized to use as many cores as you have. For the final production run, the difference is even more dramatic: 25 minutes versus 68 minutes.

So, if you’re spending a lot of time rendering lighting on levels, especially in Unreal, the Threadripper is the clear winner. But you can offload a lot of this kind of work to the GPU, especially on day-to-day lightmaps, and obviously that’s a part that can work with both setups.

Of course, there are other factors to consider, such as cost. For the CPU alone, the Threadripper costs an astonishing $5,000, which is more than the entire custom-built Intel machine.

If you’re a solo developer or even a small indie studio, your time might not be worth all that money depending on how often you’re running these tasks. It might make more sense to build a dedicated render server to let multiple developers queue up these “big iron” tasks, freeing up their (relatively) low-power machines to work on other tasks.

If you’re looking for one machine that can do it all, it’s also worth noting that AMD specifically designs the Threadripper for this kind of heavy lifting… and it doesn’t necessarily translate to gaming performance.

In fact, you’re almost certain to get better framerates out of a high-end gaming PC (Intel or AMD) with the same parts, just because modern games don’t benefit from those crazy core counts. So, if you’re building a PC that’s only sometimes used for development tasks, pouring thousands of dollars into the processor doesn’t make much sense.

As Gordon eloquently puts it, the Intel Core i9 is like a wide-market pickup truck whereas the AMD Threadripper is like a giant dump truck. They’re both extremely capable, but you don’t drive a construction zone truck to get groceries. (The groceries, in this case, being frames per second in Fortnite.)

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