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AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Gaming Benchmarks — The TLDR
As usual, we're testing with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce GPU-imposed bottlenecks as much as possible, and differences between test subjects will shrink with lesser cards or higher resolutions. Because most of the titles below show little meaningful differentiation at higher resolutions, we only tested four of the seven titles at 1440p. Be aware that the limited selection of titles tested at 1440p can result in large swings in our cumulative measurements if there's a big increase in a single title — those swings would be more muted if we had a larger selection of 1440p titles.
The above charts comprise the geometric mean of our standard gaming test suite, but we include the individual results in the charts below. Given that the 5800X3D's extra cache doesn't benefit all games and that our existing test suite also appears to heavily favor the improvements from 3D V-Cache, we also included a table with results from an additional five games below. Those extra titles aren't factored into the cumulative measurements above, but they show the same general trends.
On average at 1080p, the 5800X3D is ~9% faster than the 12900K, which costs 30% more, and ~7% faster than the Core i9-12900KS, which costs a whopping 64% more. That means the Ryzen 7 58000X3D is now both the fastest gaming chip in our test suite and a better value for gaming specifically than the Core i9 models.
Overclocking either of Intel's Core i9 models requires a beefy cooler and robust motherboard. However, despite its much tamer overall power requirements, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is still ~3% faster than the overclocked 12900K in our cumulative measurement.
The 5800X3D is 13% faster at 1080p than the stock Core i7-12700K but is only 3.6% faster than the overclocked 12700K config. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is 10% more expensive than the 12700K, but the more value-centric AM4 ecosystem gives AMD a leg up over Intel's chip, at least if you're specifically interested in gaming. As you'll see in the application testing below, the Core i7-12700K is a much better all-rounder if you're looking for performance in productivity work, too.
AMD's marketing claim is that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is, on average, 15% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900X. The 3D V-Cache doesn't improve performance in all games, so this will vary, but we recorded a 21% increase over the 5900X at 1080p in our test suite, which is incredibly impressive.
The 5800X3D and the 5800X are built from the same basic design, but the X3D model has a 200 MHz lower boost and 400 MHz lower base clock than the 5800X. Despite that limitation, we recorded a massive 28% gain over the 5800X at 1080p, which is impressive. However, overclocking the 5800X3D's memory yielded an average performance increase of only about 1%, which isn't too meaningful. In addition to our own expansive testing and experiments, we've seen plenty of benchmarks from multiple sources that indicate that memory overclocking is a fruitless endeavor with the 5800X3D. That's a good thing because you can pair the chip with inexpensive memory and get nearly the absolute best performance available, but it also means that the memory overclocking capability is merely a bullet point on the spec sheet.
| Tom's Hardware - 5800X3D Baseline | 1080p Game Benchmarks - fps %age |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 100% |
| Core i9-12900KS DDR4 | 93.5% |
| Core i9-12900K DDR4 | 91.5% |
| Core i9-12700K DDR4 | 88.6% |
| Ryzen 9 5900X | 82.6% |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 78.1% |
It is noteworthy that a few of our tested game titles approach a GPU bottleneck at 1080p, so we might see larger performance deltas when new, more powerful GPUs arrive later this year. Moving over to 1440p brings a GPU bottleneck into the equation, so the performance deltas between the chips shrink tremendously. However, those results provide a good perspective if you game at higher resolutions and don't plan to upgrade your GPU before buying your next CPU.
The competition between Intel and AMD is much closer now, and not all games benefit from the 3D V-Cache, so it's best to make an informed decision based on the types of titles you play frequently. Be sure to check out the individual tests below.
3DMark, VRMark, Chess Engines on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Synthetic benchmarks don't tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but they do show us the raw amount of compute power exposed to game engines. It's too bad most games don't fully exploit it. Here we can see that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is very similar to the 5800X in compute-bound synthetic tests. You'll see much bigger gains in the real-world games below.
Extra AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Game Benchmarks - GTA V, Project Cars 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Far Cry 5, Borderlands 3
| Tom's Hardware - 1080p Extras | Ryzen 7 5800X3D | Core i9-12900K | Ryzen 9 5900X | Ryzen 7 5800X |
| Grand Theft Auto V | 184.9 | 187.2 | 179 | 176.4 |
| Project Cars 3 | 273.7 | 257.2 | 217.5 | 215.5 |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | 235.7 | 197.9 | 174 | 163.9 |
| Far Cry 5 | 182.8 | 156.2 | 123 | 118.8 |
| Borderlands 3 | 158.4 | 140.6 | 118.1 | 114.6 |
This is, admittedly, not the best way to present this set of test results, but after seeing some of the large deltas in our test suite, we wanted to expand our view to a few more game titles that we don't normally test. Given the time pressure of the NDA lift, we threw together this quick table to give a basic view of a different mix of game titles with stock processor settings. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D comes out ahead in all but Grand Theft Auto V.
Far Cry 6 on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Far Cry 6 is sensitive to memory latency and throughput. However, it's still surprising that keeping more data close to the processing cores yields a massive 32% speedup over the similarly-equipped Ryzen 7 5800X and a 25% increase over the Ryzen 9 5900X. The gains are more muted against Intel's stable, but the 5800X3D still pulls out the win.
F1 2021 on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Some game titles respond fantastically to the increased cache capacity, and F1 2021 definitely falls into that category. Here we can see that the stock 5800X3D is 11.6% and 20.4% faster than the stock 12900KS and 12900K, respectively, at 1080p. The 5800X3D is also 20.3% and 25.8% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X, respectively.
Hitman 3 on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Intel collaborated with the IO Interactive team to optimize Hitman 3's Glacier 2 game engine for Alder Lake's x86 hybrid architecture, a fact Intel heavily promoted during its launch. Intel takes the lead after overclocking, but the dead-simple stock Ryzen 7 5800X3D setup is 5.5% faster than the stock Core i9-12900KS and 9.6% faster than the 12700K. Those processors are technically faster than the 5800X3D after overclocking, but the 12900K only leads by 1%, while the 12700K pulls off a tie.
Horizon Zero Dawn on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Horizon Zero Dawn is largely GPU-bottlenecked at the top of the chart, with the overclocked Core i9-12900K and Core i7-12700K marching in lockstep with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D holds a slim lead over the stock Intel configs.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Red Dead Redemption 2 finds the Ryzen 7 5800X3D taking the lead again, though overclocking the memory and Infinity Fabric again gives us no real tangible benefit. The 5800X3D is 9.5% and 11% faster than the stock Core i9-12900K and Core i7-12700K, respectively. Overclocking shrinks the 5800X3D's lead to 5% and 6.5%, respectively.
Watch Dogs Legion on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Intel's Alder Lake has dominated Watch Dogs Legion since launch, but here we can see that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D carves out yet another impressive win, even in the face of heavily-overclocked Intel challengers.
- MORE: Best CPUs for Gaming
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