Eight Cores At 5GHz: Intel Core i9-9900KS Review

On this page, we’re going to be tackling a few additional encoding-type projects. Since the beginning of its life, we’ve benchmarked with Adobe’s Lightroom, but dropped it for about a year or two because it wouldn’t reliably scale. Over time, things changed, and now the application seems pretty efficient on multi-core CPUs.

In addition to Lightroom, we’ve also added Blackmagic RAW Speed Test, which acts as a simple way to see how a CPU can handle playback of BRAW footage at different compression levels. In time, we’ll be adding a much fuller Resolve test to the suite, but this BRAW test fills in for now. Finally, we’re also testing with LameXP on this page, an open-source music encoder that can take advantage of many-core CPUs.

Adobe Lightroom Classic

Lightroom’s an interesting test, because for as long as we’ve tested with it, Intel CPUs have offered the best performance. That was especially the case with the 7.X generation, but as time went on, either its codebase changed to be friendlier to AMD, or the Zen 2 architecture just happens to be strong in the right ways here.

There are some odd rankings in this chart, such as the 12-core Threadripper placing ahead of the 16-core variant, which doesn’t entirely alarm us since we’ve seen strange scaling with those chips before. We’d expect (or at least hope) that the upcoming third-gen Threadripper will make these anomalies a thing of the past.

It goes without saying, though, that AMD definitely dominates this test, with all three of the Zen 2 CPUs represented here performing incredibly well overall. Given the massive amount of cache found in Zen 2, we have to imagine that’s playing a big role here, and if so, that means Intel’s next-gen Core X series CPUs are not going to change the picture up too much.

Blackmagic RAW Speed Test

Depending on the workflow and codecs used, a graphics card is likely to accelerate BRAW significantly (as hinted in the screenshot above), but you don’t want a weak CPU as part of your entire operation, because it’s not as though one or the other is used – both of them will be. In this particular test, the 9900KS couldn’t outperform the 9900K, but that’s to be expected with CPUs so close in performance and with such simple double-digit frame rates being evaluated. If the rest of the scaling is to be believed, Intel’s higher core count chips are going to be best-suited for BRAW work.

LameXP

Unlike rendering, where multiple cores can focus on one end result, music encoding will use one thread per track. With LameXP, we can do batches of those operations, with up to 64 threads being supported. Overall, having more cores is going to make a huge impact in this workload, but Intel’s top-dog 9980XE still manages to pull itself ahead of the rest of the pack. Meanwhile, the 9900KS once again pulls itself ahead of the 9900K by a fairly comfortable distance.