Leak indicates AMD Ryzen 9000X3D series CPU gaming performance will disappoint

When it comes to performance in gaming benchmarks, AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series does not exactly impress, due to the mediocre improvements observed over predecessors. Nevertheless, enthusiasts have kept alight higher hopes for the 3D V-Cache enabled Ryzen 9000X3D-series processors, expecting them to deliver a worthwhile performance uplift in games. Based on leaked images from an MSI presentation (via HardwareLuxx), though, their hopes may be dashed.

The leaked benchmarks of AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 9000X3D series indicate rather muted performance gains over the previous Ryzen 7000X3D and non-3D Ryzen 9000 models. In fact, we are talking about 11% to 13% higher gaming performance for both 8-core and 16-core CPUs, at least based on the presentation from MSI. Yet, there are more things to worry about.

Based on the slides, the Ryzen 9000X3D-series outperforms the Ryzen 7000X3D by 11% (the 8-core Ryzen 7 9800X3D) to 13% (the 16-core model Ryzen 9 9950X3D) in gaming, as demonstrated in titles like Far Cry 6, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Black Myth: Wukong. It should be noted that the new CPUs were run at the same frequency as the previous generation processors, which in the case of the 3D V-Cache-enabled variants is hard to achieve as formally they are not overclockable.

Perhaps, a more depressing thing about the new Zen 5-based CPUs is that according to MSI’s benchmarks, the new Ryzen 9000X3D with a 64MB of additional 3D V-Cache can barely beat typical Ryzen 9000-series CPUs at the same 5.20 GHz fixed frequency. Yet, AMD’s typical Ryzen 9000-series processors tend to run at higher speeds. That said, while we can expect AMD’s new X3D processors to offer a high single-thread performance in general due to a better memory subsystem, we definitely have questions about their performance advantage over typical Ryzen 9000-series CPUs.

Yet, while we can question the performance advantage of AMD’s Ryzen 9000X3D given the limited number of benchmarks and increased clocks over the prior generation, we should keep in mind that we are dealing with unofficial numbers that come from a third party. The actual performance of AMD’s Ryzen 9000X3D family will be found out in our own independent testing in due course.