Currently in the process of rebuilding my PC and I'm considering getting a 9900k or a 9700k. I'm swapping out all of my parts except for my GPU which is an EVGA 1080ti. If anyone on here owns one of these processors, I'd like to know what the experience has been like and if the 9900k is worth the extra money. My hunch tells me no because of how Planetside treats core counts (even after the DX11 bump up), but I'd still like to know if the extra cores and cache are worth it in other games. And yes I've been doing research and reading reviews, but none of them give much insight on Planetside specifically.
For Planetside there should be a 1% difference since most of the work is done by a single thread https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9900K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-9700K/4028vs4030
You might have better luck looking for info on H1Z1 (another old Forgelight engine game). My best guess - Hyperthreading won't make any difference - as it rarely makes any difference in games (indeed, occasionally hurts performance slightly). You would get a minuscule bump from the higher potential boost but that's it. Hyperthreading will help with productivity applications (Blender / Povray / Zip that sort of thing). Personally i'd find it very hard indeed to justify the extra expense on the 9900k purely for gaming. Productivity maybe - if you do a lot of the other stuff.
i recently had an insanity moment and dropped £3,400 on a Corsair i160 (i9 9900k, GTX2080ti, 32 gigs ram) its a monster, and on ultra at 2k with maxed render range i'm seeing 100-180 FPS in fights, (depends how busy!) 200 and above out of combat
Obviously the 9900k is better, but if it's just for playing Planetside, you prolly won't notice the difference. Since the game's DX11 update, it's become more GPU focused anyways. Honestly you might as well just go for a graphics card update, you'll get smoother performance with the latest RTX cards. HAving a good processor is useful in large fights, but general stuff requires GPU. So getting a better graphics card like the RTX 2080 Ti or super or whatever with more memory will benefit you more on everyday use. Most other games run on DX11 or DX12 which will rely heavily on the GPU anyways, so yeah if you want to experience certain games like never before, with ray tracing or super smooth frame rates and quality, go for the RTX cards instead of a beefy processor. To answer your question, you probably won't experience much of a difference between the 9700k or the 9900k unless you're a content creator, no game requires that much CPU. To be honest either of these cores is overkill for gaming. There might be a 1-2% difference in gaming between the 9700k and the 9900k, but you won't notice it. I'd say worry more about the GPU than CPU, when it comes to chips this powerful it doesn't even matter. Consider the fact you can overclock either and you truly get overkill. One thing though, 240mm cooling for the 9900k if you get it, it's a super powerful chip that will get pretty toasty without adequate cooling. That said the 9700k should also be liquid cooled.
