BenchPair

Core i5-13500 bottleneck & gaming FPS

Ranked 84 of 201 desktop processors for gaming in our database (58th percentile). It can sustain roughly 137 fps in a typical AAA title regardless of resolution — that ceiling is what decides whether a graphics card is worth pairing with it.

SpecificationsRaptor Lake · 2023
ArchitectureRaptor Lake
Cores6 performance + 8 efficiency
Threads20
Boost clock4,800 MHz
L3 cache24 MB
TDP65 W
Released2023
Processor ceiling by game1080p, high

The frame rate this chip could sustain with an infinitely fast graphics card. It is almost the same at every resolution, because rendering more pixels gives the processor no extra work.

GameCPU ceilingWith Radeon RX 7900 GRE
Cyberpunk 2077 142 fps 94 fps
Fortnite 175 fps 173 fps
Counter-Strike 2 198 fps 195 fps
Baldur's Gate 3 119 fps 117 fps
Red Dead Redemption 2 156 fps 104 fps
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 78 fps 77 fps
Best matched graphics cards1080p, high

Ranked by how little performance the pairing wastes. Anything much faster than the top entry will sit partly idle at this resolution — though it may still be worth it if you plan to move to 1440p or 4K.

Graphics cardEst. FPSUnused
Radeon RX 7900 GRE 135 0.7%
GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 135 1.7%
GeForce RTX 4070 Super 130 4%
GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 135 5%
GeForce RTX 3090 127 5.5%
Radeon RX 6950 XT 124 7.9%

What a Core i5-13500 is good for

This chip is capable at 1080p with a mid-range card, but it will become the limit if you pair it with something substantially faster. If you are considering a large graphics upgrade, check the pairing first — you may find most of the new card sitting idle.

Moving to a higher resolution is the cheapest way to get more out of it, because it shifts work onto the card and away from the chip.

Performance cores and efficiency cores

This chip mixes 6 performance cores with 8 efficiency cores. Games run almost entirely on the performance cores; the efficiency cores absorb background work so it does not interrupt them. That is genuinely useful, but it means the headline core count overstates gaming capability — our model counts about 10.4 effective cores here, weighting an efficiency core well below a performance one.

Hyper-threading is enabled, adding 20 total threads.

Where it sits

Ranked 84 of 201 desktop processors for gaming. Nearest faster: Core i7-12700KF, Core i5-13490F. Just below: Core i7-12700, Core i7-12700F. Full method on the methodology page.