AMD’s Ryzen 9800X3D processor may not offer the big leap in gaming performance that some leaks have previously suggested, it appears in new material shared by the German tech site HardwareLuxex (via Tom’s hardware): namely leaked slides from an MSI presentation.
According to the headline at the top of a game comparison slide, the Ryzen 9800X3D (also called an ‘8-core Ryzen 9000X3D’ CPU) is 11% faster than its predecessor, the 7800X3D, in Far Cry 6. The gains are much more modest in, for example, Shadow of the Tomb Raider (where the 9800X3D is only 4% faster) and Black Myth: Wukong (a paltry 2%).
The Ryzen 9950X3D (also called a ’16-core Ryzen 9000X3D’ CPU) sees a 13% improvement in frame rates over its predecessor, the 7950X3D, and a similar increase to the 9800X3D in the other two games, just 2% in both games. in this case. (In these benchmarks, the processors were combined with an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card).
Also shared are Cinebench results – which we previously leaked – showing that the Ryzen 9800X3D offers a big performance boost over the 7800X3D, around 18% and 28% faster than its predecessor for single-core and multi-core respectively. The Ryzen 9950X3D isn’t that much of an improvement over the 7950X3D, but in this case it would deliver an increase of 9% and 16% respectively (which is still very good).
Analysis: Reasons to be cautious
Clearly, this has caused quite a stir, as the recent rumors of high clock speeds for the 9800X3D and other leaks have gotten PC gamers quite excited about what this processor could be capable of. Especially in light of all the gaming performance disappointments of vanilla Ryzen 9000 CPUs, and Intel’s new Arrow Lake processors also falling flat for gen-over-gen PC gaming gains.
So has this new leak poured a lot of icy water on 9800X3D expectations? Well, in a word, although many of the more realistic PC gamers are admonishing those who wanted to believe the earlier rumors surrounding potentially big gaming improvements for the 9800X3D (especially given the shakiness surrounding the Ryzen 9000 launch).
However, let’s not get carried away with this particular leak either, and there are some reasons why we might need to arm ourselves with a little more skepticism than usual, aside from the normal caveats: It’s just a leak and just one set of tests.
In fact, only three games are put to the test on this last point, so it’s a pretty meager set of benchmarks. There are some strange choices here too – like Wukong (a GPU-demanding game, so not ideal for exposing the processor’s power), and Tomb Raider is seriously old now. Additionally, the presentation slide for the game results has some strange errors (the heading doesn’t match the GPUs listed with the graphs), and it all feels a bit messy… and therefore more questionable.
As the slides show, the Ryzen 9000X3D parts are also examples, with better performance expected from the retail CPUs (that said, it probably won’t be much better, given how close we are theoretically to release).
That said, the Ryzen 9800X3D may not offer a huge leap forward in gaming, but even a modest increase – with better all-round performance – is still worth it, and AMD could still adjust prices to impress as well to make. While that may seem unlikely, it all depends on how much Team Red wants to recover from its stumbles with vanilla Ryzen 9000, we suspect.
We won’t have to wait long to find out how the Ryzen 9800X3D develops, as it’s rumored that the CPU could indeed launch very soon.