News The Zen 5 Gaming postmortem: Larger generational gains than many reported, game-boosting Windows Update tested, Ryzen 5 7600X3D gaming benchmarks, too

[Admin]

We retested AMD’s Zen 5 gaming chips to suss out the true generational gains in gaming performance, and then took both Intel and AMD chips through testing with the new game-boosting Windows update applied.

The Zen 5 Gaming postmortem: Larger generational gains than many reported, game-boosting Windows Update tested, Ryzen 5 7600X3D gaming benchmarks, too : Read more

 

[philipemaciel]

"see the last section for the Ryzen 5 9600X3D results"

You probably meant the 7600X3D, or you have some exclusive chip there!

 

[bourgeoisdude]

Interesting. I would be interested to understand how your results are so much different than say, hardware unboxed. Are the non-canned benchmark sections of the games that much different? This really is an interesting topic.

 

[TeamRed2024]

Zen 5 is fine.

24677 Fire Strike Ultra

 

[vanadiel007]

So more bad news for Intel it sounds...

 

[Pierce2623]

In this article I’m seeing a clear 10%+ improvement in frame rates from pure CPU. That’s good single core gains in 2024. Arrow Lake will fall in the same area but with slightly higher power use, I imagine.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

"see the last section for the Ryzen 5 9600X3D results"

You probably meant the 7600X3D, or you have some exclusive chip there!

Fixed

 

[jxdking]

What memory kit did you use in the benchmark?
There would be big difference between 6000 CL30 and 6000 CL36.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Interesting. I would be interested to understand how your results are so much different than say, hardware unboxed. Are the non-canned benchmark sections of the games that much different? This really is an interesting topic.

Game selection and testing areas can and will make a difference. Even in games where we might overlap HWUB, if we test a different area, or the same area using a different path, that will result in changes in performance.

We can't speak to precisely how HWUB tests (I haven't looked for their latest data), but using Expo as noted has a non-trivial impact on performance, and the same goes for stuff like Windows updates, game drivers, etc. — not to mention differences in motherboards, memory kits, and graphics cards — even the exact same model GPU (i.e. an Asus ROG Strix 4090 OC) can have variance of maybe 1~2 percent across individual units.

It's relatively easy to cause up to a ~5% swing in overall performance differences by changing the games, settings, and benchmark sequences used for testing. And that's fine, that's why places test with multiple games and different places use different test suites. It's all potentially useful data.

 

[Gururu]

Very nice revisit on this. It HAD to be better than initial reports, they just didn't make sense.

 

[vijosef]

The fonts on the charts are unnecessarily tiny.
They are ilegible.

The name of the processor could be written on the right side of the axis, inside the bar. It would gain space to make the text larger.

 

[BoredErica]

Normally cpu reviews are done without overclocked ram, but in the CPU hierarchy it looks like it is. So are tests run twice then?

 

[-Fran-]

Oh, this is some interesting new information I didn't have before: "Notably, Intel does not do this." in the context of "recommending" using XMP. I had the solid impression Intel always bundled fast RAM in their review kits, but it seems that's not the case? If so, kudos to them on this specific aspect.

And, obviously, thanks for the great data and additional information around the performance characteristics of your testing. I always like it when reviewers can step away from the "enthusiast" edge a bit and get things closer to how an OEM system would actually ship. Now we just need for all reviewers to also test with TDP enforced limits on Intel like most OEM systems ship with (looking at you, Dell).

Regards.

 

[Heiro78]

Fixed

Minor edit. The 22nd image of the benchmarks under "The new landscape" The starfield jemison map, has the intel CPUs in red and the 7600X3D and 9600X in blue. Thank you for your work!