Intel's Nova Lake CPUs are coming later this year, and after a few generations of only really competing with AMD at the highest power limits, Intel's next generation is looking increasingly exciting— especially for gaming performance. …
… Features and Performance Claims Intel is promising a 1.19x overall uplift for Alder Lake when IPC and frequency are taken into account. …
Intel hasn't competed for flagship gaming performance for a couple of generations now, but its next-generation Nova Lake chips could be the fastest ever when they drop later this year. …
… Every motherboard der8auer tested -- and he mentions three by name: the Gigabyte Aorus X299 Gaming 3 motherboard, the Asus Prime X299-A, and the MSI X299 Pro Gaming Carbon -- were tested with the same CPU, a Skylake-X overclocked to 4.6GHz at 1.25v. …
… With Bay Trail regularly running 2-3x faster than Clover Trail to start with, improving its performance by a further 40% is meaningful. This is part of Intel's general goal to bring Atom performance further towards the Core standard. …
… That mode overall yielded the best gaming performance on the 2700X. …
… This new approach will require game engines to specifically support it, but the shift towards mobile gaming and Haswell's improving GPU performance make it likely that developers will add support for this method of OIT. …
… Client Roadmap Update As for client roadmaps, Intel claims its Raptor Lake platform will ship later this year with "up to double-digit performance increases." Raptor Lake and Alder Lake are both built on Intel 7 and will share a common socket. …
… The whole point of reducing CPU overhead is that it improves performance in situations where there is a CPU bottleneck -- and in modern gaming, CPU bottlenecks are rare, unless you're using a low-end CPU. …
… Exact performance comparisons will have to wait for shipping hardware, but the improvements here year-on-year are significant. Hopefully we'll see them shipping into hardware -- mostly mid-budget laptops with half-decent gaming chops -- in time for the back to school schedule.