AMD Ryzen 5 7500F review: a great value gaming CPU if you can get it

Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6 and Crysis 3 Remastered.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Nov. 28, 2023

As we mentioned earlier, we're using high-speed DDR5-6000 RAM with CL30 timings to back up each of our CPUs. You'll see largely similar results with base-spec DDR5-4800 RAM, with games like Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6 and Ashes of the Singularity showing the largest improvements from faster RAM.

Anyway - in these tests, we'll examine how this new AMD CPU behaves in Cyberpunk 2077, as well as two recent releases from series that have featured prominently in our previous CPU benchmarks: Far Cry 6, renowned for its single-core reliance, and Crysis 3 Remastered, a DF staple. We've opted for highly repeatable scenes here from a variety of sources here - an in-game cutscene, a brief open gameplay segment along a fixed route and an in-game benchmark.

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 performance at a glance.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is our second RT benchmark, showing how RT performance can add even more load to the CPU and cause CPU bottlenecking in some scenarios. This benchmark is taken from a motorcycle run along the busy city streets.

We're unfortunately missing some AMD CPUs from our results, but the trend against the Intel competition is at least clear - the 7500F and 7600X come within five percent of one another, but there's an eight percent advantage for the 13400F over the 7500F and closer to a 25 percent advantage for Intel CPUs like the 12900K, 13600K, 14600K and 14900K. Here, it looks like the Blue Team is the way to go - while AMD's X3D chips also performed well in previous testing, reaching that 110-120fps range.

Cyberpunk 2077: DX12, RT

Far Cry 6

The single-core reliance from Far Cries past returns in the sixth instalment of the franchise. That translate into a five percent advantage for the 7600X over the 7500F at 1080p, with the X3D chips screaming into a ~40 percent frame-rate advantage. The Core i5 13400F also outmuscles the 7500F, recording a result just a hair beyond the faster-clocked 7600X.

Far Cry 6: Ultra, TAA

Crysis 3 Remastered

Crysis 3 Remastered allows us to revisit our favourite scene from early on in the original game's campaign, which oscillates between character closeups and complex distant geometry to load both CPU and GPU. Once again, we're starting to edge towards GPU limitations here even with DLSS performance engaged, with essentially identical performance between the 7500F and 7600X. Intel's latest Core XX600-class and above processors are the better part of 10 percent to the good, while AMD's X3D chips are around 12 percent faster. Still, you've got to hand the win to the cheap 7500F on value grounds.

Crysis 3 Remastered: Very High, DLSS Perf

We're not going to deeper look at RAM performance this time around, given the very narrow margins between the 7500F and 7600X parts as it is, so let's press on to our thrilling conclusion.