AMD hasn’t been shy about calling the Ryzen 9 7950X3D the world’s fastest gaming processor, but that may not necessarily hold true in all cases. Michael Larabel, editor at Phoronix, has shared some benchmarks demonstrating how some of today’s top processors perform in the realm of Linux gaming, and they suggest that the Ryzen 7 7700X ($399 SEP) may actually be the best choice from a strictly performance standpoint at the moment for those are preferential to the open-source OS, edging out the Ryzen 7000X3D Series, albeit slightly. That said, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D are expected to show better numbers when the relevant optimizations for AMD’s first Ryzen 7000 Series processors with 3D V-Cache are released.
From a Phoronix report:
While going from the Ryzen 9 7950X to the 7950X3D had netted a 16% improvement in the geometric mean for the Linux gaming benchmarks, overall from the Ryzen 9 7900X to 7900X3D the performance was flat while in a few cases like Shadow of the Tomb Raider was some noticeable uplift. The smaller difference may still come down to the lack of Linux optimizations so far for AMD 3D V-Cache, so we’ll be sure to see how the situation evolves over the weeks ahead.
Where the Ryzen 9 7900X3D comes out much better than the 7900X is the power efficiency. While the average frame rate performance was often similar between the 7900X and 7900X3D, its CPU package power consumption rate was around 58% that of the 7900X! That was even better than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D on average running at around 71% the rate of the 7950X for this selection of Linux gaming benchmarks. These numbers are all much lower than what was seen with the Intel Core i9 13900K “Raptor Lake” processor during this Linux game benchmarking.
