Last month at Computex, AMD announced the 3rd Generation Ryzen CPUs using AMD’s Zen 2 architecture and TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process. Today, at E3, they’ve dropped much more information as well as the much anticipated 16 core Ryzen 9 3950X.
Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X
First off, let’s go over what are likely to be the best selling Ryzen 3000 series CPUs: the $199, and $249 Ryzen 5 six-core CPUs. These new parts will be slightly more expensive than the parts they will be replacing, which are the Ryzen 5 2600 and 2600X. That said, these new parts should have a huge increase in performance if the figures in shown the slides are any indication. Gaming especially, is an area where it seems AMD has nearly closed the gap with Intel.
And as you might have expected from seeing the gaming performance, the 3600X absolutely hammers the i5 9600K in productivity benchmarks. In Divinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere and Cinebench we see a 37% performance win at stock. The closest the 9600K got to the Ryzen 6 core is 14% in POV-Ray a benchmark that Intel has historically dominated in.
Ryzen 7 3700X and 3800X
This time AMD compared their 3800X to its $400 counterpart the i7 9700K. Here we see relative parity except in Overwatch and GTA V, that being said the numbers reported by AMD are average frame rates and not 1% and .01% lows.
Here we can see a similar trend to the Ryzen 5 Processors though the lead is not as pronounced. Likely due to the fact that the 9700k is clocked higher at stock. POV-Ray and Handbrake both are 9% faster on the 3800X compared to the 9700K though the other benchmarks are still around 30% faster.
Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X 12 and 16 Core CPUs
In this slide as well we see the 3900X roughly on par with the 9900K in gaming performance, though what these parts do once overclocked is still another story. What is probably the most important thing here, is the fact that in all of the e-sports games it is above 165Hz and around 240Hz in most of these tests. That being said it is AMDs own tests and you should wait for independent benchmarks before making a purchasing decision.
AMD also showed off a benchmark scenario of the 9900K vs a Ryzen 9 3900X at a rather high bitrate with a very taxing quality preset in OBS. This is a bit out of the realm of a “general gamer” who would either use hardware accelerated GPU streaming, or lower quality settings. Though it does absolutely crush the Intel part in this heavy workload.
EDIT: We’ve reached out to AMD for comment and they have told us:
“While a variety of fixed-function encoders and dual-system setups exist for game streaming, the former is prone to macroblocking under motion and the latter is prohibitively expensive for many. In contrast, CPU encoding generally offers a superior result for a limited bitrate budget if your chip has the raw compute to handle it without frame skipping. Of course, the encoder quality profile also has a big impact on overall encoding performance and resulting picture quality. Thankfully, the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 12 cores and 24 threads exists amongst a small group of processors capable of handling high-quality presets like Slow @ 10,000Kbps—and it’s the most powerful of the bunch! It’s worth noting that this bitrate is roughly what YouTube recommends for 1080p60 stream ingestion, while the Slow preset is desirable for its higher overall PSNR versus the raw frame. With respect to the quality profile, Streamquality.report has objectively and subjectively confirmed sharpness improvements with the ‘slow’ preset at higher bitrates (e.g. 7500Kbps+). Overall, we think this demo is an effective demonstration of why more powerful hardware is always welcome: to take on tasks that present hardware cannot do.”
- 16 Cores
- 32 Threads
- 3.5 GHz Base Clock
- 4.7GHz Boost Clock
- 72MB Total Cache
- $749 MSRP
Ok, enough about the Ryzen 9 3900X, we know why you’re here. You’re here for the eagerly anticipated 16 core which has been named the Ryzen 9 3950X. Unfortunately though AMD did not demonstrate its performance at all. If this CPU has the same 200MHz Precision Boost Overdrive as the other Ryzen 3000 CPUs would mean it can hit 4.9GHz giving a bit more evidence of Jim’s leakers claim of a 5GHz 16 core CPU.
