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 leading the pack in performance is the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D at 177.8 FPS. This pulls ahead of the Intel Core i9-14900K by 3%. The new AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is performing exactly the same as the Ryzen 9 9950X, which places them at the bottom of the graph. However, the performance is within the margin of error compared to the Ryzen 9 7900X to basically say it’s the same performance. Though, at 1440p the Ryzen 9 7900X is 2% faster at 1440p. At 170.9 FPS the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is 1.2% behind the Intel Core i9-14900K and 3.4% behind the 7950X3D. We don’t see any difference compared to the previous generation 7900X.
Alan Wake 2
In Alan Wake 2 the Intel Core i9-14900K and Ryzen 9 7950X3D take the lead again on performance in this game. The new AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is once again performing at the same performance level as the previous generation Ryzen 9 7900X. However, with the Intel Core i9-14900K in the Performance Profile, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X matches performance with the 14900K at 1080p.
Returnal
In Returnal we once again see the Intel Core i9-14900K and Ryzen 9 7950X3D on top, but note that the 14900K is only on top with the Extreme Profile in the BIOS. Once we utilize the Performance profile, that performance drops and actually matches the new AMD Ryzen 9 9900X on performance. The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X only ends up being 1% faster than the previous generation Ryzen 9 7900X in this game at 1080p.
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.