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AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 7 7700X review: maximal design

Flight Simulator 2020 and Hitman 3.

Will Judd avatar
Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry
Published on

Our benchmark results are presented a little differently to what you might be used to elsewhere on the web. On mobile, you'll get a basic overview, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat experience with embedded YT videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses; you can even choose exactly what GPUs at what resolutions you're interested in and it'll update in real time. Below the real-time stuff is a bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. As always, all the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

We'll start with two games that offer a stern test for gaming CPUs: Flight Simulator 2020 and Hitman 3.

Flight Simulator 2020

Flight Sim is our first contender, as we take an autopilot flight from London City to London Heathrow over some of the city's most well-known landmarks. This game is incredibly heavy on the CPU, even at 1440p and Ultra settings, and CPUs generally fit into different tiers based on their core count and speed.

That means we'd expect to see the Ryzen 9 7950X on top, and indeed the top AMD CPU of this generation sets a new high average frame-rate at 1080p, just edging out the 13900K at 77.5fps. Meanwhile, the 7700X is just a few fps behind, outdoing the 7600X by a good margin. Note that DDR5-6000 RAM seems to make a good difference here, with six to 10 percent performance gains visible in these results.

Flight Simulator 2020: DX11, Ultra, TAA

Hitman 3

Hitman 3's Dartmoor benchmark comes next. Of the two integrated benchmarks provided in the game's out-of-game option menu, Dartmoor offers the greater CPU load with a demonstration of the Glacier Engine's destruction physics.

Here, Ryzen 7000 doesn't come off so hot, with the 13900K and 13600K holding the top two slots in the 1080p bench at 220fps and 207fps, with the 7950X close behind at 205fps. These are all stellar results, of course, but there's a clear advantage for the Intel silicon here. The rest of the AMD stack is logical, with the 7900X at 202fps, the 7700X at 194fps and the 7600X at 191fps - so just a five percent spread evident here from top to bottom. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D remains the actual top performer for AMD, at 211fps, so there's clearly room for a future '7700X3D' design that retakes the performance crown here!

Hitman 3: DX12, Default, TAA

It's interesting stuff so far with some strong results for the 7950X in particular, but we've got plenty more to see. Let's take a look at the next set of games, this time three FPS titles.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 7 7700X analysis