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Gaming Performance on Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X — The TLDR
We’re jumping to game testing results here, but be sure to check out our IPC and power testing after the application benchmarks.
Below you can see the geometric mean of our gaming tests at 1080p and 1440p, with each resolution split into its own chart. Be aware that a different mix of game titles could yield somewhat different results (particularly with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D), but this serves as a solid overall indicator of gaming performance. 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. You'll find further game-by-game breakdowns below.
The $699 Ryzen 9 7950X takes second place in its stock configuration with a 5% lead over Intel’s fastest gaming chip, the Core i9-12900K. The 7950X is another ~2% faster after overclocking the cores and memory, essentially tying the overclocked 12900K. This marks a big generational improvement — the Ryzen 9 7950X is 17% faster than its prior-gen counterpart, the Zen 3-powered Ryzen 9 5950X, which also comes with 16 cores. However, Intel only needs to gain ~5% with Raptor Lake to match the 7950X in gaming, setting the stage for quite the competition next month.
The $299 Ryzen 5 7600X is 12% faster than the $289 Core i5-12600K, with the lead narrowing to 6% after overclocking both chips. More impressively, the stock 7600X is 4% faster than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K, bringing a new level of value to the $300 price point — with the caveat that you’ll have to deal with higher platform costs.
Notably, the 12900K is ~7% faster than the 7600X in our 1080p 99th percentile measurements, a good indicator of smoothness. The 7600X’s lead over the 12600K also drops to ~4%. However, we don’t see any egregious outliers in the 99th percentile measurements that would significantly alter our overall impressions of the rankings you see in the average fps chart.
The Ryzen 5 7600X also sports a big generational uplift of 18% over the Ryzen 5 5600X, which was once the darling of mid-range gaming builds. Raptor Lake looks enticing in the mid- and low-end price ranges from afar, but the 7600X will go a long way to shoring up AMD’s defenses. You can also tune the 7600X and eke out an extra ~3% of performance, but as always, gains will vary by title and by the quality of your chip.
The $300 Ryzen 5 7600X represents the entry-level for Zen 4, at least for now, but the Ryzen 9 7950X costs more than twice as much and is only 2% faster in gaming. That means the 76000X is an exceptional value for gaming, and as per usual with Ryzen 9 chips, the 7950X is really for those who need prosumer-class performance in applications.
AMD’s own $430 Ryzen 7 5800X3D remains the fastest gaming chip on the market by a fair margin, but this highly-specialized chip comes with caveats — its 3D V-Cache doesn't boost performance in all games. Additionally, the 5800X3D is optimized specifically for gaming, but it can't keep pace with similarly-priced chips in productivity applications. AMD will bring at least one Zen 4-powered Ryzen 7000 processor with 3D V-cache to market this year, so you might want to consider waiting a few more months if you’re after a specialized gaming chip of this ilk.
| Tom's Hardware | 1080p Game Benchmarks - fps %age |
| $430 — Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 100% |
| $699 — Ryzen 9 7950X | 93.4% |
| $549 — Ryzen 9 7900X | 92.9% |
| $399 — Ryzen 7 7700X | 92.4% |
| $299 — Ryzen 5 7600X | 91.3% |
| $589 — Core i9-12900K | 82.3% |
| $409 — Core i7-12700K | 85.2% |
| $289 — Core i5-12600K | 81.6% |
Naturally, the differences between the chips shrink when we switch over to 1440p and bring a GPU bottleneck into play, but the story remains largely similar, with scant differences between the chips at the top of the leaderboard. The competition between Intel and AMD is even closer now, so it's best to make an informed decision based on the types of titles you play frequently.
3D Mark DX11, DX12, and Chess Engines on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
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.
The Ryzen 9 7950X is ~25% faster than the Core i9-12900K and the previous-gen 5950X in the DX11 CPU tests. The Ryzen 5 7600X is ~19% faster than the 5600X, slightly beating the Core i5-12600K while bringing a new level of performance to Ryzen 5.
The DX12 tests are also impressive for Ryzen 7000 — the Ryzen 9 7950X leads the 5950X by 27% while the 7600X notches a 20% improvement over the 5600X — but Intel’s price-comparable chips still hold the lead. The Core i9-12900K is 14% faster than the 7950X, while the 12600K is 32% faster than the 7600X.
The heavily-threaded chess engine benchmarks also profit from Ryzen 7000’s improved multi-threaded performance. The 7950X easily beats the 12900K by large margins in both tests, while the 7600X improves Ryzen 5’s standing against Core i5.
Far Cry 6 on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D takes the overall lead, which we’ll see a lot as we flip through these titles, but remember that this chip can be finicky — some titles see little to no uplift.
The Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 9 7950X are impressive in this series of tests with a ~21% lead over their prior-gen counterparts. They also stack up well against Alder Lake, with the 7600X being 15% faster than the 12600K, and the 7950X taking a 6% lead over the 12900K.
We see roughly the expected uptick from overclocking the Ryzen 7000 models, but you’ll notice the Alder Lake chips suffer from lower 99th percentile measurements after tuning. That’s an interesting and repeatable condition, but it seems to be confined to this title in our suite.
F1 2021 on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
The Ryzen 7000 chips take the top of the chart in overall framerates, but like their prior-gen counterparts, they have proportionally lower 99th percentile framerates than the Alder Lake processors. We didn’t notice any outwardly visible rough play and we are looking at framerates in excess of 300 fps, so this is more of an interesting tendency than something that manifests as noticeably poor performance.
The Zen 4 chips take a big lead over the stock Intel comparables, with the 7950X being 16% faster than the 12900K and the 7600X taking a 20% lead over the 12600K. The Intel chips profit more from overclocking in this title than the Ryzen 7000 models, gaining roughly 10% while the new Ryzen chips gain around 5%. Again, this doesn’t matter much when peaks hit 300+ fps.
Hitman 3 on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
Intel used to enjoy a sizeable lead over Ryzen in Hitman 3 because the game is specifically tuned to leverage the E-cores effectively by offloading low-priority tasks like physics to the small cores. That changes with Ryzen 7000 as it takes the lead over Intel again, but the deltas between the price-comparable chips aren’t as pronounced as we see against the previous-gen Ryzen chips. For instance, the 7950X is 25% faster than the 5950X and the 7600X is 37% faster than the 5600X.
Horizon Zero Dawn on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
Horizon Zero Dawn doesn’t scale exceptionally well with more host processing power, so like many of the titles you’ll see in the real world, the delta between the highest-end chips can be slight.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2021 on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is simply outstanding in this title, highlighting that the chip can provide huge speedups in some titles. However, that can skew overall rankings. This is why the chip is, on average, the fastest gaming chip in the world, but be aware that can change drastically based on the game you’re playing.
The stock 7950X and 7600X lead the 12900K and 12600K by ~14%. The Intel 12900K and 12600K profit heavily from overclocking, gaining 19% and 16%, respectively, while the Ryzen 7000 chips gain roughly 5% from tuning. Despite Alder’s big overclocking gains, the tuned Ryzen chips land within a few percent of their price-comparable competitors.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
The 7950X leads the 12900K by 8%, while the 7600X continues to impress with very similar performance to its much more expensive counterpart. It’s also 14% faster than the 12600K.
Watch Dogs Legion on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
Watch Dogs Legion brings a much-needed win for the 12900K as we close out our gaming benchmarks. However, the 12900K’s 2% lead over the 7950X is slim. Meanwhile, the 7600X is 6% faster than the 12600K.
- MORE: Best CPUs for Gaming
- MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
- MORE: AMD vs Intel
- MORE: Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 All We Know
- MORE: Raptor Lake All We Know
