Ryzen 7 7800X3D Smashes Core i9-14900K in Factorio Gaming Benchmark

Ryzen 3D V-Cache CPU
Ryzen 3D V-Cache CPU (Image credit: AMD)

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D continues to show why it's one of the best CPUs for gaming. German news outlet Computerbase reported that the Ryzen 7 7800X3D annihilated the upcoming Core i9-14900K by a hefty 64% margin in the Factorio gaming benchmark.

As its name implies, Factorio is a 2D simulation game where you construct and manage factories. It features a built-in benchmark with different maps to measure processor performance. Factorio is one of the few games that aren't graphics card-bound, so its usage has slowly become more mainstream. It's essential to mention that Factorio loves cache, which gives the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and other chips with AMD's 3D V-cache a massive advantage over Intel's parts.

Unlike other games where performance is measured in frames per second (FPS), Factorio results are expressed in updates per second (UPS). The higher the number, the better because it indicates that the processor can perform the calculations faster, so the game runs faster. The person who benchmarks the Core i9-19400K, most likely a reviewer, used the flame_Sla 10k - 10x1000spm Belt Module map, one of the most popular maps for measuring processor performance on Factorio.

Intel Core i9-14900K Benchmarks

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Processor75th Percentile
Ryzen 7 7800X3D450.1
Ryzen 9 7950X3D415.9
Ryzen 7 7800X3D404.7
Ryzen 9 7900X3D368.3
Ryzen 7 5800X3D339.8
Core i9-14900K275.2
Core i7-13700K266.6
Core i9-13900K261.2
Ryzen 7 7700X245.1
Ryzen 5 5600X243.0
Core i5-14600K239.7

Because Factorio is cache-intensive, it shouldn't be surprising that AMD's Ryzen 3D V-Cache parts dominate the leaderboards. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D led the rankings 64% faster than the Core i9-14900K. Even the last-generation Ryzen 7 5800X3D outperformed the Core i9-14900K by 23%. The vanilla Ryzen models are no match for the Core i9-14900K. The forthcoming Raptor Lake Refresh flagship delivered up to 12% higher performance than the Ryzen 7 7700X, the fastest Ryzen chip without 3D V-Cache on the Factorio leaderboard.

The Core i9-14900K wasn't the only unreleased Raptor Lake Refresh chip in the database. Someone also benchmarked the Core i7-14700K under the same settings. The Core i9-14900K was only 3% faster than the Core i7-14700K, which is not a shock since the latter is the only Raptor Lake Refresh chip that received a minor E-core upgrade. 

Compared to the existing Core i9-13900K, the Core i9-14900K was only 5% faster. Again, this is within expectation since Raptor Lake Refresh mostly features somewhat higher clock speeds than the regular counterparts. The Core i5-14600K, on the other hand, performed similarly to the Ryzen 5 5600X from AMD's previous generation of Ryzen 5000 lineup powered by Zen 3 cores.

Raptor Lake Refresh will reportedly launch on October 17, a few days from today. The new 10nm processors won't disrupt the market, but they should keep Intel afloat until Arrow Lake is ready in 2024.

Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • vertuallinsanity
    So Computerbase has the older 8c16t AMD part beating the new Intel part ~64%(!) in a single gaming benchmark.

    Dexterio (?) Has the newer 16c32t AMD "marginally" losing to the new Intel part in a 25 test run with at least 10 games but no info on the other benchmarks.

    Both are leaks from the last 4 days. Both are written as AMD leaning. How does anyone make sense of this?
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    A program which loves cache and takes advantage of the 3D cache of the 7800X3D beats a chip with far less cache?

    Here's another spoiler: A program which takes advantage of multiple cores effectively will perform better on an EPYC 96 core than a Xeon 56 core.
    Reply
  • Arbie
    So Intel has finally made it to 10 nm? Cool. (I haven't looked at their stuff in years...)
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Arbie said:
    So Intel has finally made it to 10 nm? Cool. (I haven't looked at their stuff in years...)
    That part surprised me. Intel calls it Intel 7, in order to align themselves with how TSMC and Samsung call their roughly comparable nodes.

    However, the very same node currently known as Intel 7 was once called 10 nm ESF (Enhanced SuperFin). So, the author isn't wrong to say "10 nm".
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    A program which loves cache and takes advantage of the 3D cache of the 7800X3D beats a chip with far less cache?
    I guess the real news is that Factorio is such a program.

    For me, what's a little surprising is that its sweet spot lands so squarely within the additional capacity provided by the 3D VCache. Had its working set been just a bit larger or smaller, maybe the X3D models' advantage would've evaporated.

    I'll bet the game's developers probably weren't aware of this. Given a bit of time, they could probably optimize it to work a lot better on non-X3D models.

    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    Here's another spoiler: A program which takes advantage of multiple cores effectively will perform better on an EPYC 96 core than a Xeon 56 core.
    I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty surprised to see a game which scaled well to so many cores. That would also be newsworthy!
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    bit_user said:
    I'll bet the game's developers probably weren't aware of this. Given a bit of time, they could probably optimize it to work a lot better on non-X3D models.
    This bench runs the same huge factory 10 times, now there might be some people that actually play the game this way but I doubt it very much that any dev would spend any resources to optimize for such an extreme case.
    https://factoriobox.1au.us/map/info/4c5f65003d84370f16d6950f639be1d6f92984f24c0240de6335d3e161705504
    Reply
  • Darkeasterbunny
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    A program which loves cache and takes advantage of the 3D cache of the 7800X3D beats a chip with far less cache?

    Here's another spoiler: A program which takes advantage of multiple cores effectively will perform better on an EPYC 96 core than a Xeon 56 core.
    It's not the fact that it's faster that is noteworthy, it's the margin by which. 64% is extreme.
    Reply
  • waltc3
    CPUs running programs that cannot feed the onboard processing units fast enough to max out CPU performance are simply slower, as this bench illustrates so well. And I don't even know if these AMD x3D CPUs are actually maxed out by Factorio...;) Cache has been King in CPU design as long as I can remember.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    waltc3 said:
    Cache has been King in CPU design as long as I can remember.
    Not all software is equally sensitive to the X3D models' cache size increase. It actually varies quite a lot. Some are hurt more by the loss of clock speed than they're helped by the additional L3 cache. I think that makes it more of an unreliable Prince?

    We saw further examples of this, when Bergamo launched. That provided some nice 3-way comparisons and you could see that certain things liked having 128 cores @ half-L3 more than having 96 cores @ triple-L3. It really helps that the underlying microarchitecture is virtually the same, across all 3.
    https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9754-bergamo
    Reply
  • waltc3
    bit_user said:
    Not all software is equally sensitive to the X3D models' cache size increase. It actually varies quite a lot. Some are hurt more by the loss of clock speed than they're helped by the additional L3 cache.

    We saw further examples of this, when Bergamo launched. That provided some nice 3-way comparisons and you could see that certain things liked having 128 cores @ half-L3 more than having 96 cores @ triple-L3. It really helps that the underlying microarchitecture is virtually the same, across all 3.
    https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9754-bergamo
    Yes, absolutely. Not all software is optimized to run fastest on the user's hardware. But it doesn't change the fact that with software optimized to make the most out of the hardware in a given system, that cache is king in the CPU, provided your processing units can run as fast as the cache can feed them the data...;) So, both are needed--better/faster/larger cache coupled with better/faster processing units--lest anyone think it's "just" the cache differences. This is why these results are so starkly in favor of the x3d chip designs. If the processing units on the CPU could not keep up with the cache, then it would scarcely matter. Slower processing cores could make little use of much faster/larger cache. And it's not just the amount of cache but the speed of it, as well. It shows how powerful the AMD x3d processing cores are. You would get the same result running any other CPU-optimized software like Factorio. Also, I remember (vaguely) reading some blurb the other day in which Intel stated that it would have to emulate AMD's x3d cache approach, and had plans to do so. Was it fake news? I doubt it, but these days, who knows?...;) Makes perfect sense to me, however.
    Reply