AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D beats the Core i9 12900K in gaming benchmarks

The launch of AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D is imminent. Chips are out in the wild and early bird reviews and benchmarks are popping up on the web. Given that AMD has been touting the gaming prowess of the 5800X3D, we've been waiting to see if that claim holds up. And it appears that it does.

Peruvian hardware site Xanxo Gaming (via 3DCenter) managed to get hold of a retail Ryzen 7 5800X3D and put it through a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, comparing it to Intel's Core i9 12900KF. As the site wasn't sampled by AMD, it's not subject to an embargo.

The reviewer compared 11 games running at 720p and 1080p. In games that are less sensitive to the amount of cache, The CPUs are mostly neck and neck. However, there are several games that show significant increases. In games such as The Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy XV, the AMD Ryzen 5800X3D had a lead of 22% and 29% respectively. There are many instances of 1% lows heavily favouring the 5800X3D too.

The 720p results aren't all that relevant to real world use cases, and they show even larger gains. Though again, the differences between the two systems are negligible in many cases.

Though this is just one set of results, early indicators are that AMD's claim that the 5800X3D is a gaming oriented processor appear true. Productivity benchmarks show little to no gain, and some will actually regress due to the slightly lowered clock speeds. But that's fine, AMD hasn't made any claims to the contrary.

It's worth noting that the two test systems use DDR4-3200 memory. The 12900KF supports DDR5 which means it will gain some performance when paired with high speed memory. But quality DDR5 costs money and that's another advantage of the 5800X3D. You can update your BIOS and drop it into an older AM4 system without spending big money on a new motherboard and memory.

It's not all rosy for the 5800X3D though. It doesn't support overclocking and it will carry a price premium over the already very good 5800X. So, unless you're a hardcore gamer with a top end GPU chasing every frame you can get, or have an older gen processor, early indicators are that you shouldn't feel a compelling need to upgrade from a 5000 series processor. That goes for gamers using Intel systems too.

What this early taste does do is make us excited about what AMD can do with 3D V-Cache in the future. The boost in gaming performance, higher clocks and higher IPC of Zen 4 processors could bode very well for AMD. Intel and AMD are set to battle it out later this year, and we can't wait.

PC Gamer's Ryzen 7 5800X3D review will appear after the embargo is removed. Stay tuned for our comprehensive analysis!