Gaming Continued
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.
Cyberpunk 2077
In Cyberpunk 2077 the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D has a big lead at 222 FPS at 1080p which is well above any CPU. Then we see the Intel Core i9-14900K follow, in both profiles. Sadly, in this game, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X doesn’t do as well as other CPUs and actually ends up regressing performance under the Ryzen 9 7900X from the previous generation by 6% at 1080p.
We spent a lot of time troubleshooting any performance issues, including several fresh installs of Windows and fresh installs of the game. We have sent all of our HWiNFO64 log data to AMD to further help in troubleshooting any performance issues on the new AMD Ryzen 9 9900X in this game. At this time, this is our experience, and the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is slower than its predecessor at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077.
Dying Light 2
The opposite of our experiences in Cyberpunk 2077 are experienced in Dying Light 2. In this game, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X has a positive improvement of 5% over the previous generation Ryzen 9 7900X at 1080p. It is also 7% faster at 1440p. We are seeing a bottleneck happen in this game on all the AMD CPUs at 1080p, with their performance similar to the 1440p performance. It is less so on the Intel Core i9-14900K, but still present there as well. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D takes a pretty big lead in performance over the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X by 18%. The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is about 10% slower than the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X at 1080p.
Starfield
Both the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and AMD Ryzen 9 9900X do rather poorly (by comparison) to the other CPUs in Starfield. We actually see much better performance out of the 7950X and 9950X compared to the two 7900X and 9900X parts. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D does well also, but the Intel Core i9-14900K is the fastest at either profile.
The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X actually ends up at the same performance level as the previous generation Ryzen 9 7900X, with no improvement at 1440p. In fact, at 1440p there is a bit of a regression by 3% with the new AMD Ryzen 9 9900X. This is twice now we’ve seen an obvious regression in performance with gaming.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage
In Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D takes the lead at 220 FPS followed closely by the Intel Core i9-14900K in either profile mode. The new AMD Ryzen 9 9900X ends up performing exactly the same as the previous generation Ryzen 9 7900X, as we’ve seen in a lot of other games. Interestingly, it is 1.6% faster at 1440p, but that is very close. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is also very close to the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X in performance and matches it with the 1440p performance. This puts the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X 9% behind the Intel Core i9-14900K.