An Italian YouTuber has tested the unreleased AMD Ryzen 9 9900X processor, showing performance closer to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in some instances. The latter, however, remains the go-to chip for gamers wanting the best.
After receiving his Ryzen 9 9900X early, SaddyTech tested it to find out how AMD’s latest Zen 5 architecture holds up against the previous generation. On average, the Ryzen 9 9900X was about 8% slower than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D at 1080p. This gap shrinks to 6% at 1440p, then 3% at 4K where the GPU becomes the bottleneck.
To be more specific, Ryzen 9 9900X delivered 145fps on average in Hogwarts Legacy at 1080p against 164fps for Ryzen 7800X3D. In The Last of Us, 7800X3D once again managed to pull ahead by 18%. Cities Skyline 2 benefitted the most, with a 22% increase. That said, some games like Starfield, Total War: Warhammer III, and Warzone 2 didn’t see that much from the 3D V-Cache, delivering similar results on both CPUs.
This shouldn’t surprise us since AMD itself indicated that its newcomer doesn’t have enough grunt to dethrone the existing gaming king, even though it has four extra cores. SaddyTech did also notice that Ryzen 9 9900X required more power in some games. For example, the CPU consumed 107W against 53W on the 7800X3D when running CS2.
For his review, SaddyTech used an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card and DDR5-7200 RAM on an X670 motherboard, with be quiet! Dark Rock 4 cooling the processor.
According to the batch number written on the IHS, AMD will have manufactured the CPU sometime between June 10 and June 16, 2024. This means that AMD should have a good stock of these chips, hopefully allowing interested users to get one quickly.