AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D review: cache money

We've run our benchmarks at the standard three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p and 4K, but we're focusing the bulk of our attention on those 1080p results, as this is where differences between different CPUs are most visible. (There's an argument for testing at 720p to make these deltas even more visible, but even mainstream PC gaming has long since moved onto 1080p.) We're using an Asus RTX 3090 OC for these results.

This page is all about FPS fps - the frames per second you'll see in some of the best first person shooters on the market, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War. Both of these are RT-enabled benchmarks, as we examine performance in their single-player campaigns.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus represents an absolute triumph for the 5800X3D, with a solid 15 percent advantage over the standard 5800X. That's by far the fastest result we've ever seen in this RT-enabled benchmark, although the 5800X3D advantage does erode at 1440p and disappear entirely at 4K where we're GPU-limited.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War comes next. Here, the focus is less on competitive performance and more on the single-player side of things, as we enable ray tracing and hop into one of the first campaign missions, Fracture Jaw. Interestingly, this mission has RT disabled on consoles, even when the option is enabled elsewhere in the game, suggesting that the BVH building process here is particularly tough. The opening scene, as Bell joins Adler on the fields of Vietnam, is heavy on the CPU at the relatively low graphical settings we've chosen.

We see a smaller advantage for the 5800X3D, putting it between the 5800X and the 5950X, or between the 11900K and the 12600K on the Intel side of things. So we're getting a performance uplift here, but it's not quite as transformative as it was in Metro Exodus EE. We do at least see the delta remain measurable at 1440p and 4K, so you get the advantage even at higher deskop resolutions.

We conclude our new standard gaming tests on the next page, where we take on Cyberpunk 2077 and two new editions of Digital Foundry favourites: Far Cry 6 and Crysis 3 Remastered.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D analysis

• Introduction, test rig and content creation benchmarks
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3
• Gaming benchmarks: Metro Exodus EE, Black Ops Cold War
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Crysis 3 Remastered
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D: the Digital Foundry verdict