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AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D Gaming Benchmarks — The TLDR
The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is the world’s fastest gaming processor, if only by 3.3%. It’s faster than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, regardless of how marginal that victory is and how little it meaningfully impacts the gaming experience. Then again, if you already own the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, you probably never planned on upgrading to the Ryzen 7 9850X3D.
The more interesting dynamic is for new builders who have to choose between the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 7 9850X3D, and with prices how they currently are, that’s an easy choice. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is 6.4% more expensive than the current price of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D (even more expensive compared to the sales price), and it offers a 3.3% uplift on average. From a value perspective, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D still clearly wins the day.
We’re testing with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 FE to isolate CPU performance as much as possible and skirt GPU-imposed bottlenecks. With less powerful GPUs and higher resolutions, the performance gap between each CPU will shrink.
Focused purely on gaming, there really isn’t another CPU in the conversation. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D gets close, but the cheaper eight-core X3D chip still comes out ahead. You’ll spend around the same price on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D as Intel’s closest competitor, the Core i9-14900K, and AMD still comes out over 20% ahead. The comparison to Arrow Lake is even worse, with the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K still managing less performance than the lowly eight-core Ryzen 7 9700X.
The real battle is between the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and there’s more working in favor of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D than just price. With its 400MHz clock boost, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D consumes much more power. In our test suite, it consumed nearly 31% more power, ran hotter as a result, and was only marginally more efficient than the Ryzen 7 9700X; the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is still the most efficient offering in our test pool.
As we’ll get to with our bespoke power and efficiency tests, peak and idle power between the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Ryzen 7 9800X3D doesn’t show such a stark gap. These power numbers in games are telling, however. You’ll most likely use this chip for gaming most of the time, and the extra power consumption just doesn’t translate into meaningful performance gains.
When looking at our geomeans above, note that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D isn’t included. We tested this chip as part of our test pool, and you’ll see it in individual game benchmark charts below. However, it’s not available for sale, the secondhand market demands upwards of $500 for one, and it posted odd results in Minecraft RTX (which we’re troubleshooting), so for now, we excluded it from the overall measurements.
A Plague Tale: Requiem Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
A Plague Tale: Requiem is one of the few games I was surprised to see a performance uplift in. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D manages a minor 2.8% improvement, which you wouldn’t expect out of a modern, GPU-intensive, and story-driven game. Unfortunately, that boost comes at the cost of a 28.6% increase in power consumption and a 5-degree Celsius increase in thermals, despite the Ryzen 7 9850X3D running 200MHz below its maximum boost clock.
Baldur's Gate 3 Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Baldur’s Gate 3 shows a more favorable side of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, with it outperforming its predecessor by nearly 6%. That’s a solid improvement, and it’s even more impressive compared to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, where AMD’s latest eight-core X3D is 29% ahead. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D managed to get closer to its maximum boost clock at 5.5GHz in this title, but it also consumed 29% more power than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
Counter-Strike 2 Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Counter-Strike 2 is a new addition to our test suite, and it’s a game that should love the 400MHz boost on the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. It only loves that boost by about 1.5%, however. That’s despite the Ryzen 7 9850X3D boosting to 5.55GHz (the highest clock speed for the chip we recorded in game testing) and consuming just shy of 100W; something that only chips with monstrous core arrays mirror.
Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Cyberpunk 2077 scales well on CPUs due to the huge amount of work the RED Engine has seen over the years, but it is still ultimately a GPU-bound game. As evidence, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D actually posted higher performance than the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, though they’re exactly one frame apart from each other. The devil here comes in power and thermals. Despite offering identical performance, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D ran hotter and consumed more power.
Doom: The Dark Ages Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Doom: The Dark Ages is another new addition to our games list, showing how CPUs scale not only with the Vulkan graphics API, but also with a game that has always-on ray tracing. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is the least interesting aspect of these charts; it offers similar performance and consumes more power compared to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
What’s interesting is how X3D chips dominate this chart, and how the Core Ultra 7 265K earns a lead over the Core i7-14700K. With the randomness involved in BVH construction and traversal, additional cache does a lot to speed render time.
F1 2024 Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Like Baldur’s Gate 3, F1 2024 favors the higher clock speed of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, with the chip posting a 4.7% lead over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and a sizable 12.9% jump over the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. The story writes itself at this point, however. That single-digit jump over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D came at the cost of 44.4% higher power consumption and a 14% increase in temperatures.
Far Cry 6 Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Final Fantasy XIV Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Flight Simulator 24 Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Flight Simulator 24 is notoriously heavy on the CPU, and it’s one of the few titles that benefits more from cores and clocks than it does from the addition of extra L3 cache. This is one of the few titles where the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D offers a lead over its cut-down, eight-core sibling, but the Ryzen 7 9850X3D manages to set a new bar 6.2% ahead of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. That comes with a large increase in power consumption, mind you, but it’s still one of the clearer wins we saw for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D out of our testing.
Hitman 3 Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Hogwarts Legacy Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Minecraft Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Although Minecraft isn’t the first game that comes to mind for CPU benchmarking, it actually can pose a significant performance challenge to modern CPUs. For our test, we use the Portal Pioneers RTX map, which runs our character though a short track that’s easily repeatable. Critically, we set the render chunk distance at its maximum of 96, which is more taxing than most of the other tests in our suite.
Monster Hunter Wilds Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Spider-Man 2 Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Starfield Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
The Last of Us Part One Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
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