Gaming Performance
Now we come to the interesting testing we are sure you all can’t wait for, we were also anxious to get to this part and see how it all ends up for gaming performance. In order to test this properly, really get a good feel for it, and cover all the bases for the big picture, we decided to test 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions, all three resolutions to see from top to bottom how these CPUs affect performance games. For testing, we are using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition video card. Since we are testing all 3 resolutions, it’ll be a good mix to see where the CPU matters and where it doesn’t.
Forza Horizon 5
Let’s start with one of the newest games in our testing suite today, Forza Horizon 5 on the PC. For this game, we are using the built-in benchmark and using the “Extreme” graphics profile setting.
Right off the bat, we can see CPU affecting performance in this game. The Intel Core i5-12400 has the highest performance shown, beating the Ryzen 5 5600X in performance. At 1080p the 12400 is 4% faster than the 5600X, at 1440p it’s also 4% faster, and even at 4K it is 4% faster. It’s also faster than the Ryzen 5 5600G by a greater degree. The 12400 is faster than the 5600G at 1080p by 10%, 1440p by 8%, and faster at 4K by 6%. It’s also faster than the 3600X by a bit more. It is interesting to see even 4K vary that much, but the results were consistent.
Battlefield 2042
Now, since this game is a multiplayer game, it is hard to test in a live environment and have consistency. Therefore, we chose to create a private Portal server, and test with no players, it’s the only way we can assure a consistent run-through. We created a custom team deathmatch and a manual run-through in the whole map.
In Battlefield 2042 we find some very large differences between the CPUs, especially at 1080p, but also there are significant differences at 1440p. At 1080p the Ryzen 5 5600X is faster but at 1440p and 4K the Intel Core i5-12400 and AMD Ryzen 5 5600X match performance. The AMD Ryzen 5 5600G is significantly slower at every resolution, and the 3600X is the slowest. The Intel Core i5-12400 at 1080p is 8% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600G, its closest competitor. It’s also 7% faster at 1440p, meaning the 12400 is better for this game than the 5600G.
Cyberpunk 2077
Note that we are testing performance with the newly released Patch version 1.5 in this game. As demanding as this game is, we definitely see differences in performance at 1080p between all the CPUs, and only at 1440p and 4K are we GPU bound, mostly. At 1080p though the Intel Core i5-12400 is clearly the faster CPU and provides faster performance. It’s 4% faster than the 5600X and 11% faster than the 5600G. Once again we see the 5600G trail farther behind, it cannot keep up with the 5600X in gaming.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Game Of The Year Edition
We have installed the latest huge patch to Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 which brings it up to the new Game of the Year Edition. This new edition has major performance changes, including a new DX12 API mode we are going to use for today’s testing.
This game is very CPU bottlenecked on all of these CPUs at 1080p with this fast RTX 3080 Ti video card. This is proven because we actually get higher performance at 1440p than we do at 1080p on every CPU and the performance is very close between resolutions. That said, the Ryzen 5 3600X struggles the most overall in this game, we see a big uplift in performance moving to the Zen 3 architecture here. The Intel Core i5-12400 follows suit and is on par with the 5600G in performance, with the 5600X only slightly edging it out at 1080p and 1440p.