sucks is relative... first understand if you have a fx8350 and a 60hz monitor, you'll never really be able to tell the difference between it and an intel in 99% of games and aps.
That said there are several reasons it lags behind Sandy bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell I5/I7 cpus in gaming.
1) x87 encoding: several popular contemporary games were coded with x87 encoding. A type of encoding that AMD CPUS do not support, and has not supported since it stopped being supported as an industry standard, 12 years ago. Games like Skyrim and Civ5 depend heavily on x87 encoding; intel continues to support this legacy encoding format.
2) Poorly threaded games: It has been almost 10 years since dual and quad core cpus became the norm, yet even today, many games are released which are almost entirely single threaded (or mostly single threaded), this type of lazy coding favors FAST cores, over MORE cores. As a result, games on intels tend to play better
3) different core design: With bulldozer, AMD went modular. This allowed them to keep costs down, and build chips according to the client's needs, It was because of this they were able to bid and win the contracts to the next gen gaming machines, as it was simply cheaper and easier for them to modify their chip design then it was for anyone else. This is VERY useful in business as well, which is a lot of money if it works. The problem is, Bulldozer doesn't scale up well, Oh sure, at low power levels, and slow clock speeds it is amazingly efficient... the bulldozer "inspired" cat core family are not just competitive with similar intel offerings, but in some cases flat out superior. The problem is it doesn't really scale up well, and becomes more and more inefficient the higher the clock speeds and voltages. In short the design never really panned out.
4) poor L3 cache: Its amazing to think AMD's Caching and memory controller used to be far superior to anything intel had to offer. Well those days are behind us... the L3 cache that AMD uses is little better then ddr3 ram, causing some titanic bottlenecks... it's believed piledriver operates at only 70-75% of it's possible performance due to this terrible cache. If they had an L3 cache in as efficient as Intel's, it's possible piledriver would be about as fast clock per clock as sandy bridge.
5) poor memory controller: AMD's memory controller is about 2/3 the speed of intel's... again... much like with the L3 cache issues, this poor memory controller sevierly handicaps AMD cpus.
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