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. We are going to include 1080p, 1440p, and 4K performance to see the overall big picture of performance. That said, you’ll want to focus on the 1080p results primarily to gain a sense of the level of framerate each CPU is able to provide to the GPU, it is the best predictor of potential performance. In addition, we think you’ll see some interesting scaling starting to happen in the 1440p area as well in some games between the CPUs, so look for that.
For testing, we are using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition video card with driver version 560.70. All games are being run in their “Ultra” game settings, at native resolution, and with no ray tracing. Each graph is first sorted by 1080p performance, and then second by 1440p performance. In this way, you’ll see which is the fastest CPU with a 1080p resolution. For games with a built-in benchmark, the benchmark is used, in games that do not have a benchmark we do a manual run-through.
Horizon Forbidden West
In Horizon Forbidden West the top performing CPU is the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D at 179 FPS at 1080p. The new AMD Ryzen 5 9600X is 4% faster than the Ryzen 5 7600X at 1080p and 1% faster at 1440p. The Ryzen 5 9600X is 1% behind the Intel Core i5-14600K, and 3% behind the Ryzen 7 9700X, and 7% behind the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
Alan Wake 2
In Alan Wake 2 the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D leads in performance at 178.7 FPS at 1080p. However, right below it falls the brand new AMD Ryzen 5 9600X which is second in performance on this graph. It is only 1.5% behind the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in performance here, and similar performance at 1440p. In fact, the Ryzen 5 9600X edged out the 9700X by 1% in performance. This puts the Ryzen 5 9600X 4.4% ahead of the Ryzen 5 7600X in performance and 3% ahead of the Intel Core i5-14600K.
Returnal
In Returnal the fastest CPU is the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D at 215 FPS at 1080p, but once again the new Zen 5 CPUs fall in line next, with the Ryzen 5 9600X matching the 9700X at 213 FPS. This puts the Ryzen 5 9600X only 1% behind the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in performance. The Ryzen 5 9600X therefore is 3.3% ahead of the Ryzen 5 7600X and 2.4% ahead of the 14600K.
Avatar Frontiers of Pandora
We wanted to include Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora for two reasons, it is an Unreal Engine 5 game which are increasing in number, and we also experienced no performance differences to speak of between the CPUs, even at 1080p. This game utilizes Ray Tracing which is “always on.” In this scenario, even on an RTX 4090 at 1080p no CPU really has a noteworthy advantage. This example is relevant just to show that some games may still be bound by the GPU, even at 1080p and CPU performance differences may not show depending on the game and settings. It’s just an example of how game-dependent CPU performance can end up being, but let’s move to the next page.