AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X review: welcome to the future

Counter-Strike: GO, Metro Exodus EE and Black Ops Cold War.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Updated on Sept. 27, 2022

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 graphics card for these results.

This page is all about the fps you get in FPS games. Our trio of games in this section includes Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The latter two are RT-enabled benchmarks, as we examine performance in their single-player campaigns.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike remains the gold standard for competitive FPS, and is unique amongst our benchmark suite as it is a DirectX 9 title that can be played on even modest hardware at hundreds of frames per second. Regardless, serious players value a high and stable frame-rate, and going for a modern CPU like the ones we've tested can result in a much better experience when playing on a suitably high-refresh rate gaming monitor.

Ryzen CPUs typically fare very well here, and indeed the 7900X beats out the 12900K by three percent on average in apples-to-apples testing - and that all-critical worst one percent score is also 12 percent higher on the AMD side.

The 7600X is more of a revelation, eclipsing the 12600K by a solid 20 percent. If we look back at the 5600X, we also get a solid 20 percent gen-on-gen improvement with the 7600X. Counter-Strike doesn't take advantage of the improved v-cache in the 5800X3D and isn't unduly aided by faster RAM, so Ryzen 7000 is the way to go here.

CS:GO: DX9, Very High, AF off

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is an RTX-only variant of the vanilla game, run here with DLSS engaged to uncouple the GPU and push the strain onto the CPU as much as possible.

Ryzen 7000 performs incredibly well here, with the two CPUs in the 260-270fps range while Intel's 12th-gen parts are limited to 200-215fps. That's a 25 percent advantage for the red team. Note that if you're on AM4, the 5800X3D delivers equivalent performance to Ryzen 7000.

Metro Exodus EE: DX12, Ultra, RTX, DLSS Performance

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.

Things reverse in Black Ops Cold War, with the 12900K leading against the 7900X by around four percent at 1080p when both are using the same RAM speed. The 7600X, for its part, is faster than the 12600K by around the same margin. This is one of the few tests where the 5800X3D is faster than its Ryzen 5000 peers, but slower than Ryzen 7000.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War: DX12, Low, TAA

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.