AMD vs. Intel: Which CPUs Are Better for Gaming?

Whenever you’re building a new gaming PC, you’re going to have to decide between Intel and AMD for your processor. However, as the years go on, the right answer is constantly changing. For instance, when I built my first PC with the Intel Core i5-2500K, that processor was known as the mainstream gaming processor. Fast forward to today, and that title is held by the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, thanks to a unique cache design that’s especially well suited for running PC games at a high frame rate.

But it’s more complicated than that. Picking the best CPU for your PC depends entirely on what you’re going to do with the system, along with your budget. Someone that just plays games on their PC is going to want different things out of their processor than someone who uses it for both video editing, with some gaming in their down-time.

Intel vs AMD: PC Gaming

Building a gaming PC is a time-honored tradition at this point, and when you’re picking the right processor, knowing how it performs in the games you love is extremely important. Any CPU on the market right now is going to be awesome for gaming, with even the weakest Intel and AMD processors easily able to power the most demanding games. However, if you want to get as much performance as possible, especially if you’re feeding a high-end graphics card like the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, things get a bit more heated.

AMD is fresh off the release of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an 8-core, 16-thread processor, but with a unique trick up its sleeve. This processor features AMD’s 3D V-cache technology. You see, traditionally a CPU’s cache is physically located next to the CPU cores, but starting with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, AMD was able to print the cache above the CPU cores. This doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but it did two things: reduced the latency between the cache and the cores, while allowing more physical space for the cache itself. This makes 3D V-Cache faster and more capacious than the cache found in other processors.

This ends up being extremely important for gaming, because of the massive amounts of data the CPU is constantly gobbling up when feeding your graphics card with frame information. By both speeding up the cache and allowing for more of it, gaming performance improves. Typically performance improvements here come in the form of stability, meaning there’s less difference between your maximum and minimum frame rate.

Intel has taken a different approach lately. Starting with the amazing 12th-generation Alder Lake processors, Intel adopted a big.LITTLE design philosophy, similar to ARM processors and those found in the latest Macs. This pairs larger performance cores with smaller efficiency cores. The idea is to have the performance cores tackle demanding workloads like games, while allowing the efficiency cores to handle background tasks. Intel has taken this design and paired it with strong single-core performance from its efficiency cores in hopes of retaining its gaming crown.

In some games, this even works out, but as more and more games adopt multi-core processing, it’s proving to have diminishing returns, especially when compared with AMD’s X3D chips. With its latest processors, Intel has opted for a reset of sorts, taking steps back in gaming performance in the interest of cutting back on power consumption and temperatures, while also working in an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI workloads. While it’s nice to see Intel make up for some of the shortfalls that famously befell its 13th- and 14th-gen Core processors, it makes the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and other CPUs in its lineup hard to recommend for anyone that just wants a gaming PC.

Winner: AMD

Intel vs AMD: Content Creation

Creative apps like Adobe Premiere and Blender simply need different things than a PC game. While there are certainly apps that love large amounts of cache with a high framerate – looking at you, Photoshop – that’s far from the end of it. In fact, it seems that Intel’s approach to chip design does pay off when it comes to performance for creative professionals.

Across every CPU I’ve tested over the last year or so, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K has impressive performance in apps like Adobe Premiere and Blender, beating out the AMD equivalent, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X in Premiere, and essentially matching it in Blender. Similarly, the Core Ultra 9 285K also holds the performance crown right now in Cinebench, scoring 42,245 points to AMD’s 41,123. That’s a minor difference, to be sure, but the performance results definitely lean in Intel’s favor.

The only real difference right now is in Photoshop, where like PC games, cache is extremely important. Photo editors can get up to 31% better performance with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, compared with the Ultra 9 285K. Considering how expensive these processors are, figuring out the performance difference in the app you use most is extremely important. After all, time is money.

Winner: Intel

Intel vs AMD: Motherboards and Platform

When you buy a new processor, you’re not just deciding on the little square brick you’re plugging into your motherboard, you’re deciding on the motherboard itself. However, AMD and Intel handle their platforms differently, even if they’re both using an LGA socket these days.

Intel usually has a new socket with every other generation of processors. For instance, both the Intel Core i9-13900K and the Core i9-14900K were using the LGA-1700 socket, which meant the processors were both compatible with Z790, but also the Z690 motherboards shipped with the 12th-generation Alder Lake processors. However, with the move to the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, Intel’s latest processors need a Z890, H810, or B860 motherboard to work – and these chipsets will not work with an older CPU.

AMD takes a slightly different approach. AMD only just recently moved on from the AM4 socket that it supported with its Ryzen processors since the first generation, which supported new processors from 2016 until 2022. Then, in 2022, AMD finally released a new socket, AM5, which supports both Ryzen 7000 processors and the new Ryzen 9000 chips. Plus, AMD has committed to supporting AM5 until at least 2027.

Now, it’s key to keep in mind that AM5 refers to a socket and not a chipset. Just like Intel, AMD releases a new chipset designed to take advantage of new technology with every generation, with the X870 coming out to support the Ryzen 9 9950X. For most people, regardless of choosing AMD or Intel, as long as a chipset supports the processor you’re looking at, you’re not going to notice a lot of difference in performance either way, with only extreme overclockers and creative professionals needing the new tech in cutting-edge motherboards.

With new platforms comes problems, however, and both Intel and AMD will usually have some growing pains with new generations of both CPUs and motherboards. In my experience of reviewing new processors as they come out, AMD generally has a bit of a rougher time with bugs and stability issues with its new platforms. These problems do tend to work themselves out after a couple of months, though.

That said, Intel does screw up too. Most recently, its 13th-generation and 14th-generation processors had a microcode issue that caused them to suck up too much power, greatly affecting their potential lifespan. Just like any issue, this has been fixed with BIOS and Microcode updates, but it was a huge deal.

Winner: Toss-Up

The Benchmarks

If you just want to see how the performance stacks up for these processors, I went ahead and included my recent benchmarks.

Conclusion: AMD For Gamers, Intel For Creatives

At the end of the day, current-generation desktop processors are extremely powerful across the board. No matter if you plug in a CPU from Team Red or Team Blue, you’re going to get awesome gaming and creative performance. However, if you just want to pick one that’ll give you a slight performance edge one way or the other, going with Intel for creative work and AMD for gaming is a good rule of thumb.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra