The battle between Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 0.79%) and Intel (INTC 2.20%) for the hearts and minds of PC gamers took a turn last year in favor of Intel. Intel's Raptor Lake chips generally beat AMD's latest Ryzen 7000 chips across all types of workloads, and aggressive pricing gave Intel a significant edge in terms of performance-per-dollar.
AMD's Ryzen 7000 chips have been selling at retail with steep discounts for months, making them a bit more competitive. But in terms of raw gaming performance, Intel's Raptor Lake has been tough to beat. That changes today as AMD officially launches its Ryzen 7950X3D chip. Featuring an extra slab of ultra-fast cache memory, the 3D V-Cache enabled processor is the new king of gaming.
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Key Data Points
An expensive gaming monster
PC games are sensitive to single-threaded performance. While games can generally make use of multiple threads, they don't scale nearly as well as other types of applications with the number of CPU cores.
This dependence on single-threaded performance is one reason why Intel's Raptor Lake chips have fared so well in gaming applications. AMD's Ryzen 7000 chips are plenty fast, but they're not quite as fast as Intel's best.
One other thing matters for gaming performance: the amount of cache memory. An ultra-fast CPU that sits idle waiting for data from system memory isn't going to reach its full potential. The more cache that sits close to the CPU, the more data that can be copied over, and the less time the CPU spends waiting.
This is the premise behind AMD's 3D V-Cache chips. By adding an additional module of L3 cache stacked on top of the processor, AMD's 7950X3D comes with a whopping 144 MB of total cache. That's more than double the cache available on Intel's high-end 13900K.
In many types of applications, this extra cache doesn't matter. But for video games, where there's a ton of data being shuffled around, the more cache, the better. Tom's Hardware found that the 7950X3D delivered 12% greater gaming performance on average at a 1080P resolution than Intel's 13900K. Some games benefit from the extra cache more than others, but taken altogether, AMD's new chip is the clear winner.
Two big downsides
Price-to-performance is a different story. That 12% gap in performance comes at a heavy cost. The 7950X3D is priced at $699, while the 13900K from Intel sells at retail today for around $569. The 12% bump in gaming performance comes at a 23% higher price tag, which means this new chip from AMD will only make sense for those wanting the absolute best gaming performance no matter the price.
Other than the high price, AMD's 7950X3D comes with another downside: Performance in non-gaming applications is lackluster. That extra layer of memory requires lower clock speeds, so when it comes to productivity applications, AMD's standard Ryzen 7950X and Intel's 13900K come out on top in nearly every benchmark.
Tom's Hardware found that Intel's 13900K wins by 17% in single-threaded applications and by 4% in multithreaded applications. As an all-around chip, the 7950X3D and its sky-high price tag doesn't make a lot of sense.
While the 7950X3D will certainly find some customers willing to pay top dollar for the best gaming performance, it likely won't change the balance of power in the PC CPU market.
