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

Cinebench

When Cinebench R20 released a few years ago, the performance scaling we saw was a bit different than the previous version, as the new one made sure modern CPU architectures were being better taken advantage of. That being the case, AMD’s Zen CPUs were really impressing all over, especially as core counts grew. With Cinebench R23, Zen CPUs have typically won over Intel in each core-for-core test we’ve done.

Well, Alder Lake has sure thrown a wrench into AMD’s gears. In yet another surprising (to us) result, Intel’s new 8P+8E CPU design with the 12900K is strong enough to have it outperform AMD’s 16-core 5950X. We’re simply blown away by this. Those strong advantages carry over to the single-threaded test, as well.

We were without a Cinema 4D license when we got down to testing Alder Lake, so that’s your answer for why those additional tests are not here. We’re planning on taking a deeper look at C4D R25 soon, so we’ll take care of that before long.

Corona Renderer

With Corona Renderer, Intel’s top-end i9-12900K slightly beats out the 5950X in the living room scene, while AMD’s mainstream champion pulls further ahead in the sales gallery scene. All in all, Intel is still proving very impressive considering half of the 12900K’s cores are “energy-efficient”, while four of the 12600K’s are – and yet they are still performing really well.

LuxMark

Some renderers and scenes let the 16-core 5950X strut its stuff well, but LuxMark becomes one of the others that really seems to like Intel’s new chips. In both scenes, the 12900K places ahead of the 5950X. Most significant is still the fact that gen-over-gen results for Intel look really good – the 12900K soars past the 11900K in both tests.

If we saw these results out-of-context, we’d assume that LuxCoreRender using Intel’s Embree ray tracing kernels would be the reason for the lead, but other results here have proven it’s not only with Embree that Intel can leap ahead in rendering.

POV-Ray

Wrapping up our rendering results, we’re seeing more of what we’ve largely seen throughout most of them: Intel’s 12th-gen chips are a force to be reckoned with. In both the single- and multi-threaded tests, the 12900K places in the top spot. In the multi-thread test, the 12900K pulls ahead of the 5950X further than in other rendering tests we’ve looked at, and the single-thread performance from all of the tested Intel chips put themselves on a different level entirely than Zen 3.