AMD says the Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 is the ‘world’s best gaming CPU’
Can Ryzen 5000 topple Intel from its gaming throne? We’ll have to test it.
AMD’s highly anticipated Zen 3 made its debut last month with four new Ryzen 5000 CPUs that aim to snatch the gaming crown from
Intel. You won’t even have to wait that long, as AMD said the AM4-based CPUs would all go on sale on 5 November.
The four models released are:
Ryzen 9 5950X: 16 cores, 32 threads, 4.9GHz boost, 3.4GHz base, 105-watt TDP, $799 (around £603)
Ryzen 9 5900X: 12 cores, 24 threads, 4.8GHz boost, 3.8GHz base, 105-watt TDP, $549 (around £414)
Ryzen 7 5800X: 8 cores, 16 threads, 4.7GHz boost, 3.8GHz base, 105-watt TDP, $449 (around £339)
Ryzen 5 5600X: 6 cores, 12 threads, 4.6GHz boost, 3.7GHz base, 65-watt TDP, $299 (around £172)
At the time of writing UK prices had not been confirmed.
Although the chips are built on the same TSMC 7nm process as the Ryzen 3000-series, AMD said it has squeezed more boost clocks plus an impressive 19 per cent more instructions-perclock efficiency out of the new cores in testing against the previous Zen 2 cores. The company cited improvements such as cache, execution, branch prediction and load/store for upping the efficiency overall (1).
The other gain comes from the design of the Ryzen 5000 chips. AMD’s previous Ryzen 3000 chips were built on a base structure of four compute cores. The new Zen 3 chips are built with up to eight compute cores on a single die, resulting in greatly reduced latency between cores compared to the older design. With the new design, all eight
cores on a die now share the same L3 cache and help boost the Ryzen 9 5900X past its bitter enemy in gaming (2).
You can see the immediate gains in performance claims when AMD compares a Ryzen 9 3900X against a Ryzen 9 5900X. The Zen 3 chip is putting out double-digit increases in performance against its predecessor (3).
Beating Ryzen isn’t the point, of course. Calling the Ryzen 9 5900X the “world’s best gaming CPU”, AMD showed off a raft of games where a Ryzen 9 5900X matches or exceeds a Core i9-10900K while gaming at 1080p with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU. Among the games shown by AMD, the flagship consumer Core i9-10900K exceeds the Ryzen 9 5900X only in Battlefield V, but not by much. In fact the Ryzen 9 5900 was only 3 per cent slower than the Core i9 chip. Otherwise, AMD showed off performance where the Ryzen 9 is typically 5 to 6 per cent faster. In a few less-intensive games, the Ryzen 9 5900X actually bests the Core i9-10900K – by 21 per cent in League of Legends, and 19 per cent in Counter Strike: Global Operations (4).
ZEN 3 ERASES THE ‘RYZEN GAP’
Perhaps more telling is the performance of the Ryzen 9 5900X in Far Cry: New Dawn, where the Zen 3 chip is basically
In gaming, AMD showed off the Ryzen 9 5900X either tied or ahead by single-digit percentage increases in performance against the Core i9-10900K (6).
IT’S POWER-EFFICIENT, TOO
AMD further stressed that its new Zen 3 chips lead in power efficiency, which is a little less pressing for desktops than it is for laptops, Compared to the original Ryzen 7 1800X, a new Zen Ryzen 9 offers up a 2.4X increase in performance per watt. It’s even greater against Intel’s Core i9, with power efficiency 2.8X better than that of a Core i9-10900K chip.
“This is a big, big moment for us as a company, and for a lot of us personally,” said AMD technical marketing manager Robert Hallock in a briefing with reporters.
Hallock compared the Ryzen 5000 series to the company’s prior success with Athlon 64, when AMD was firing on all cylinders. “Those times are here again,” Hallock revealed. “We are about to release a product that has full-spectrum, total coverage leadership of every sort of performance metric that a gamer, that a PC enthusiast would want a desktop CPU to offer. And we’re the only ones doing it right now.”
The last surprise of the day came from a reveal of AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000-series GPU and some preview performance. AMD said the new
GPU – long called ‘Big Navi’ – can run Borderlands, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Gears of War 5 all set to their maximum settings and well above the 60fps threshold many gamers demand, at 4K resolution. AMD said it tested the new RX 6000-series card on a new AMD Ryzen 9 5900X naturally. The preview numbers would indicate the new Radeon is competitive with Nvidia’s well-received GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card.