AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 7 3800XT: performance analysis

We continue our analysis of the 3800XT and 3900XT with four more games, all built around live gameplay rather than canned benchmarks. Metro Exodus and Kingdom Come Deliverance are good examples of modern games that aren't afraid to put CPUs through their paces, while Crysis 3 and The Witcher 3 are popular classic games that were incredibly tough to run back and in the day and remain formidable even in 2020. Will one of these titles be the one that justifies the 'XT' processors over their predecessors?

Once again, we have opted for scenes that are repeatable run after run and aren't too difficult to reach, an important factor when you're retesting a troublesome processor for the tenth time in a day - or you're a reader wanting to perform a similar test on your own rig to see if an upgrade would be worthwhile!

Remember that you can mouse over the results in the tables below (as long as you're using a desktop browser rather than a phone) to get dynamically generated performance readouts for all processors we've tested. Meanwhile, clicking the graph swaps you into percentages, making it a bit easier to judge relative CPU performance at a glance.

Crysis 3

Crysis 3's Welcome to the Jungle section has actually contributed two scenes to our gaming benchmarks, with the first being the explosive end to the level - used for GPU testing - and the second being a mid-mission cinematic that tries to get across the enormity of the task facing you. One of the reasons we like this test so much is that it's remarkably consistent, with relatively low run-to-run variance that can make comparing otherwise very similar processors a little easier. That's a good thing too, because the XT models don't run away with the show on this one.

Instead, they provide marginal increases to frame-rate across the board, with the 3900XT just one frame per second faster than the 3900X and the 3800XT about half a frame faster than the 3700X. There's a clear hierarchy here, with the 3600X to the 3900XT all falling in line according to their asking price, but the 3600X looks by far the best value given that you only move from 172 to 179fps on the higher-spec CPU but the cost more than doubles. Intel's lead here is relatively slim, with the Core i5 9600K actually falling behind anything north of the 3600X, but the 9700K, 9900K, 10600K and 10900K all outperform the 3900XT by some margin.

Kingdom Come Deliverance

Kingdom Come Deliverance is next. It's another CryEngine game, released five years after Crysis 3, which seems an eternity in terms of gaming hardware. The game is still plenty challenging in 2020 too, thanks to the inclusion of an ultra high preset that stresses both CPU and GPU to extremes. Indeed, even the fastest spec sheet we could muster, the 10900K and RTX 2080 Ti, still only manage 94fps on average at 1080p here!

The 3900XT and 3800XT are among the best AMD participants, but they only manage to outperform the Core i5 9600K from our results with average 1080p frame-rates of 79 and 77fps, respectively. The 9900K and 10900K are nearly 20 per cent faster than the 3900XT, and even the 10600K leads the 3900XT by 10 per cent. There are plenty of great reasons to choose the AMD platform, but out-and-out gaming performance doesn't look to be one of them this time.

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus is one of the weird ones, a test that seems to prefer lower core and thread counts to higher ones, with the 9700K and 3700X being among the best performers for their sides. Regardless, the overall trends are clear - Intel retains a sizeable performance advantage at 1080p, with the slowest Intel competitor (the Core i5 9600K) being 11 per cent faster than the 3900XT, and the fastest (the Core i7 9700K) being 18 per cent faster. These are not insurmountable leads, but AMD will have to do something special with their next generation processors if they want to take the gaming performance crown from Intel.

The Witcher 3

We conclude with The Witcher 3. Again, there's a significant difference between AMD and Intel representatives, with Core i7 and Core i9 models sitting around 185fps and the best Ryzen processors managing only around 155fps. To be clear, the game remains eminently playable on both Intel and AMD-based systems, with no dramatic stutters or slowdowns, but the nearly 20 per cent lead shown here is far from insignificant. Thankfully, this does ease at 1440p and 4K, as the graphics card becomes the bottleneck of the system.

AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 7 3800XT analysis

• Introduction, hardware breakdown, test system
• Gaming benchmarks: Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Battlefield 5, Far Cry 5
• Gaming benchmarks: Crysis 3, Metro Exodus, Kingdom Come Deliverance, The Witcher 3 [This Page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT: the Digital Foundry verdict