AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Review: AMD Retakes Gaming Crown with 3D V-Cache

Ryzen 9 7950X3D Integrated GPU Benchmarks

We did a few in-depth tests to determine if the Ryzen 9 7950X3D's integrated GPU benefited from the 3D V-Cache tech, and in short, it does not. You can read more about that here, but in summation, the iGPU resides on the I/O die and is a self-contained unit with its own L2 cache. As such, it doesn't access the L3 cache on the compute die. Therefore, any performance gains couldn't come from additional cache bandwidth. Instead, any increase would have to come from the 7950X3D's phenomenal gains in CPU compute performance. That would push the GPU even harder, but the CPU isn't the limiting factor. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D's iGPU only has two RDNA 2 compute units (CU) at its disposal, so it doesn't have the necessary horsepower to benefit from increased memory bandwidth or a faster CPU. This unit is entirely GPU compute-bound.

AMD has been quite clear that the Ryzen 7000-series' new iGPU isn't meant for any type of meaningful gaming. Instead, it's meant to provide basic display-out capabilities for troubleshooting and the like, as well as enough performance for watching videos and doing basic office tasks. 

The above table is a bit dense, but the first and second columns are key for our commentary, while the remaining columns show our test results. We ran a series of benchmarks with five titles: Dota 2, F1 2021, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Strange Brigade, and Grand Theft Auto V, at 1920x1080 and 1280x720 resolutions to test the performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D's integrated GPU versus the Ryzen 9 7950X's iGPU. We used either low or medium settings for these titles.

The first column sums it up well: The 7950X3D vs 7950X results are mostly within one percentage point of each other, which mostly amounts to less than one fps of difference. That small delta falls within the expected run-to-run variation of these benchmarks, so you can safely view these as a tie. There is no difference in performance between these two iGPUs.

The Ryzen 9 7950X3D and the Ryzen 9 7950X have some minor differences, but there is a way to further narrow down any potential gains from the 3D V-Cache tech: The 7950X3D has two chiplets, one with 3D V-Cache and a 'bare' chiplet without the 3D-stacked cache. We disabled one chiplet for each of these series of tests, therefore either running the games on only the 3D V-Cache chiplet or on the bare chiplet.

Again, there is no meaningful difference between the chiplets. Even if the X3D stacking tech could help, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D's integrated RDNA 2 iGPU isn't strong enough to utilize the additional resources. The RDNA 2 iGPU comes with two compute units, 4 ACE, and 1 HWS, so that should be pretty apparent.

Overall, the 7950X3D's iGPU remains just as compute-starved as the identical unit on the Ryzen 9 7950X, so there are no gains to be had. Not that it's much of a competition — Intel's iGPU is also basically worthless for gaming. Given our results, it's safe to say that nothing has changed with the Ryzen 7000-series RDNA 2 iGPU's relative performance positioning against Intel, which you can see here. Hopefully, AMD will use 3D V-Cache tech in a purpose-built APU configuration that could leverage the increased throughput, but the additional cost makes that seem unlikely.

Ryzen 9 7950X3D Benchmark Test Setup and Overclocking

• Ryzen 9 7950X3D: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, default power limits, DDR5-5200 (Coupled Mode)
• Ryzen 9 7950X3D PBO/UV: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, Precision Boost Overdrive (Advanced/Motherboard), Scalar 10X, -25 Curve Optimizer, DDR5-6000 EXPO (Coupled Mode), Silicon lottery and cooling performance impact overhead -- YMMV

As mentioned, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D doesn't support overclocking via the CPU multiplier, so you can't change the core clocks directly. You also cannot adjust CPU voltage directly.

However, AMD has added support for altering the power limits (PPT, TDC, EDC) through the auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) feature, and you can also now undervolt the X3D chips using the Curve Optimizer — these features weren’t supported on the previous-gen model. You’ll see plenty of examples of the PBO and PBO+UV settings we experimented with on the following pages.

Overall, we found that the PBO+UV settings did little to improve our overall performance measurements in gaming, though we did see some performance fluctuations in certain titles. However, the PBO+UV configuration delivers larger gains in productivity applications, particularly in lightly threaded fare.

The Ryzen 9 7950X3D also supports overclocking the memory and Infinity Fabric. We used a DDR5-6000 EXPO profile for our overclocking testing, as this represents the sweet spot for Zen 4 processors. As you'll see in our gaming tests, engaging the EXPO profile alone does very little to improve performance, but using it in tandem with PBO or undervolting yields solid gains.

We test Intel processors with the power limits fully removed for our standard measurements, so those chips run beyond the 'recommended' power settings but remain within warranty. We used DDR5 for both the Raptor Lake and Zen 4 processors.

Microsoft has advised gamers to disable several security features to boost gaming performance. As such, we disabled secure boot, virtualization support, and fTPM/PTT on all systems for maximum performance. You can find further hardware details in the table below.

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