Intel’s Celeron G6900 Alder Lake CPU Seemingly Struggles In AAA Games

The Intel Celeron G6900’s specifications include two Golden Cove cores and no Hyper-Threading. It runs at 3.4 GHz, with 4MB Smart Cache and 2.5 MB of L2 cache. The processor supports up to DDR4-3200 or DDR5-4800. Intel’s UHD Graphics 710 iGPU has up to a 1.3 GHz boost and 16 EUs. This Celeron has a 46W TDP. This all sounds pretty nice, but thanks to Steve at Random Gaming, he showed us that these fancy numbers don’t seem to add up to great gameplay.

As he was testing the base model in the Alder Lake lineup, which cost $42, Steve saw it to match it with the cheapest Intel LGA1700 motherboard he could find, the Gigabyte H610M S2H DDR4 for which he paid $110. The RAM quantity wasn’t skimped upon for a budget build, with 16 GB (8 x 2 DIMMs) of DDR4-3000.

The results showed The Witcher 3 at 1080p high with an average of 43 FPS, marred by lengthy intermittent freezes, which couldn’t accurately qualify as stutters – these pauses were far too long (1% low 0 FPS).

In GTA San Andreas at 1080p high, the system achieved an average of 58 FPS, and the glitches and slowdowns were much more bearable (1% low 15 FPS).

For Cyberpunk 2077 playing at 1080p low in the Badlands, we saw an average of 47 FPS 1% low of 11 FPS). However, this game has a bigger problem, as it will not load save games when this lowly 2C/2T processor is your CPU. It is hard to complain about this “bug” as the Celeron is two cores short of the minimum specced CPU.

The YouTuber ran CS:GO at 1080p low settings on the Dust II map. The average in-game performance was 120 FPS (1% low 42 FPS), so performance was much more respectable.

Steve went on to test Fortnite, Forza Horizon 5 (hangs at loading screen), GTA 5, Far Cry 6 (so slow it is unplayable), and Red Dead Redemption 2 ran at an average 34 FPS using 1080p “console settings.”

To conclude his exciting insight into the G6900, Steve indicated that there wasn’t much point in going for this latest-gen Celeron over any previous-gen entry-level Intel processor that is still available due to the higher motherboard costs at this time. Troubling news for such a highly touted CPU.

(All information was provided by Tom’s Hardware)