Gaming Benchmarks
These benchmarks do not represent real-world gameplay by any stretch of the imagination. These tests are conducted using built-in benchmarking tools utilizing the game engine. These tests are designed to stress the CPU’s power system as well as ensure proper functionality. These are all run at CPU limited resolutions to try our best to remove the video card as a bottleneck.
One additional note about gaming performance is that these are average values. They do not tell the whole story. Specifically, Destiny 2’s low’s and high’s help tell a very different story than what the average reports are. Fortunately, while the lows are considerably lower than that of Intel CPU’s, the amount of frames that drop into the lowest range are extremely few. As a result, it isn’t something you necessarily feel. I had intended on showing averages, minimums, and maximum frame rates, but this proved to be an extremely massive undertaking. Not all the in-game benchmarks provide this data, which means I have to use something like NVIDIA’s Frameview to do it. For that data to be meaningful, I had to gather this data on all the processors listed, which is a daunting task. This is something I hope to bring to future reviews, but couldn’t get done here.
3DMark 10
3DMark 10 isn’t my favorite test as the variables that impact gaming performance do not always impact the results in 3DMark with the appropriate weight. Case in point, Intel’s Core i5 9600K is more competitive gaming-wise than this application would generally indicate. What we see here is core count and clock speed weighing in with more relevance than it probably should. While these things matter, in more than 90% of cases, the 9600K is plenty fast at gaming, and probably faster than the 3600X.
Heaven
The results are rather interesting as the 9600K is slower at stock and overclocked speeds.
The Division 2
In The Division 2, the Intel systems are clearly much faster than their AMD counterparts. However, we still see solid performance from AMD and the Ryzen 5 3600X looks to be “good enough” in this game despite the lack of cores compared to the other offerings in this lineup.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
This is a test where we can see a fairly significant gap between AMD and Intel. The 3600X a bit slower than the Core i5 9600K. However, the 3600X proves to be as fast as any of the other AMD CPU’s in this lineup and remains faster than most in this scenario.
Hitman 2 (2019)
While normally Intel’s domain, the Ryzen 5 3600X manages to exceed the performance of Intel’s Core i5 9600K by a small amount.
Destiny 2
Destiny 2 is a weird game on AMD hardware. Primarily, we see averages that are usually similar to that of Intel systems in most cases. However, the minimums will generally be far lower, but the maximum frame rates will be substantially higher. I expected more of that, but the 3600X fell a bit short of its brethren here. We can see the Ryzen 5 3600X struggle to keep up with the CPU’s that offer a higher core count as well as Intel’s Core i5 9600K. The performance of the 3600X is more like that of the last generation’s 2700X. This is also a case where the Intel Core i5 9600K has a substantial lead over AMD, despite its lack of cores or Hyperthreading.