Intel 12th-gen Core i9-12900K & i5-12600K Workstation Performance Review

Premiere Pro: Project Encodes

Adobe’s Premiere Pro helps kick-off our look at 12th-gen performance, and right out of the gate, we’re impressed. AMD’s Zen 3, and especially the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X, seemed like it’d be a hard to beat for a while with a test like Premiere Pro, but Intel proves that it still has what it takes to release a new architecture that can effectively “wow” us. In both encodes here, the 8+8 design of the i9-12900K bests AMD’s 16-core 5950X.

As for the i5-12600K, it too impresses, using its 6+4 core design to leap far ahead of not just the 6-core Ryzen 5 5600X, but the last-gen 8-core i9-11900K.

As with many creator workloads nowadays, using only the CPU isn’t always the best way to go about getting an encode process done quickly. If we enable CPU+GPU encoding, scaling becomes much tighter:

Even with the benefit of the GPU helping out so much in these encodes, both of Intel’s new 12th-gen chips tested here still stay glued to the top.

The above results represent real project encodes, but let’s get a little more granular and see how things shake up when we test specific codec transcodes instead:

Premiere Pro: Transcoding

This is quickly turning into a rather exciting performance review. We’ve been so used to seeing Intel release a new generation of chips that didn’t feel that revolutionary, and that’s making Alder Lake feel like the most refreshing Intel launch we’ve seen in a while.

In all of the codec tests above, Intel’s Core i9-12900K beats out AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X, and in the RED tests specifically, the i5-12600K manages to pull that off, too. It’s clear that with some encodes, it’s not always additional cores that can make a big difference, but more efficient and higher-performing cores instead.

Let’s reintroduce the GPU into our testing:

As we saw with our CPU+GPU project encodes earlier, Intel still manages to keep glued to the top of most CPU+GPU codec tests, with the exception of the 5950X proving better in the RED test, and on par in the ProRes test.

Premiere Pro is just one video editor / encoding tool, so let’s see how Intel’s latest handles the also-popular VEGAS Pro next:

VEGAS Pro

We’re not including CPU+GPU encode tests here because we encountered sporadic results overall, and couldn’t put much faith into all of them. Of the tests we did feel confident in, it seems CPU+GPU is even more important in VEGAS than in Premiere Pro – the deltas between all of them were modest.

Nonetheless, when engaging only the CPU, Intel’s and AMD’s current top-end mainstream chips match each other – with the exception of the Median FX test, which saw Intel gain a notable advantage. Both the Colorize and Style Transfer tests use CPU-bound AI, so it’s really interesting to see both the 12900K and 5950X perform identically in both.

We didn’t have time to update our tests for VEGAS Pro 19 in time for this article, but we’ll be getting down to exploring performance there soon, including taking a look at any new FX that may exist that could take good advantage of the CPU (or GPU, for that matter.)

Up next, a look at something a little different: photogrammetry.

Metashape

Unlike most other workloads featured in this article, photogrammetry is one that makes it difficult to choose which CPU is the “best”, as each process of the entire photogrammetry task will use the processors differently. Aligning Photos uses both the CPU and GPU, as does Build Depth Maps. Meanwhile, Build Dense Cloud and Build Mesh uses only the CPU.

Overall, Intel’s top-end i9-12900K continues to prove that it means business, ranking at the top of most tests here. The Build Mesh result is the most interesting, since Intel claims the first three spots, while the 16-core 5950X drops to the bottom. This is behavior we’ve seen before, where the 5600X could manage to beat out the 5950X, and that really comes down to what we said above about why it’s difficult to find a “best” CPU for these tasks. Some CPU designs, their core counts, and their per-core performance can dramatically change behavior.

Ultimately, both of these new Intel chips perform very well here. It’s important to note that the GPU matters quite a bit in photogrammetry, as well. You can see recent performance in the Build Depth Maps test across 19 GPUs on the same CPU in our recent Radeon Pro W6600 and W6800 review.