AMD offers a glimpse into Ryzen 5000 Zen 3's leads in gaming compared to Intel Comet Lake offerings

The AMD Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 Vermeer generation of processors are launching today. In the wake of the launch, AMD offered a glimpse into how the new Zen 3 processors fare in gaming benchmarks. Of course, we have our own extensive tests for the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X (Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 5 5600X coming soon), but here's AMD's take on why Ryzen 5000 could be a great option for gamers.

According to AMD, the primary benefactors for gaming are the new unified core complex (CCX), 19% increase in IPC, and the new cache topology.

The new unified core complex enables all eight cores to use a common 32 MB L3 cache. This is particularly beneficial for many games as the dominant thread running the game will be able to fetch data from a contiguous L3 block instead of having to seek data from two L3 stores.

AMD said that the 19% IPC uplift was arrived at by taking the geometric mean of about 25 different workloads among which games made up a sizeable proportion.

Additionally, that the new cache topology offers improved core to core and core to cache latency.

All of these features collectively enable much better gaming performance at both 1080p and 720p resolutions compared to Intel Comet Lake or even gen-to-gen such as Ryzen 3000 Zen 2. 

AMD offered gaming comparisons between the Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X, Ryzen 5 5600X, and finally, the Ryzen 9 5950X. These processors were compared with corresponding Comet Lake contemporaries with similar PC configurations including the use of an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. 

The Ryzen 9 5900X is being pegged as AMD's flagship gaming CPU with 12 cores 24 threads, 70 MB total cache, and a 4.8 GHz boost. AMD said that the Ryzen 9 5900X leads the Core i9-10900K in 30 out of the 40 games tested. The biggest leads were seen in League of Legends and Counterstrike: Global Offensive while both processors tied in The Witcher 3, GTA V, Final Fantasy XIV, Anno 1800, etc. On the other hand, the Core i9-10900K had leads in games such as Battlefield V, Metro: Exodus, Rainbow Six Siege, and Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

AMD said that the selection of games is reflective of popularity on Steam and did admit that not all games can be expected to show significant leads compared to the competition. However, the Ryzen 5000 processors offer enough GPU headroom to minimize bottlenecks as much as possible. AMD showed how the Ryzen 9 5900X also shows decent leads in 720p gaming as well. 

Check out the slides below for an overview gaming performance of the Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and the Ryzen 5 5600X in comparison with corresponding Intel counterparts.

While the Ryzen 9 5900X and below SKUs are the ones being recommended for hardcore gamers, the Ryzen 9 5950X is not a bad choice either. According to AMD's data, the Ryzen 9 5950X is almost on-par with the Ryzen 9 5900X in most games and both SKUs in turn are anywhere between 9% and 53% faster than the Ryzen 9 3950X depending on the title.

Of course, this is AMD's take based on a limited set of games. For more information about the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X and how they perform across our battery of tests, check out our complete review.

AMD Briefing