3D Vertical Cache technology has been boosting the gaming performance of AMD chips for several years now. And there's no end in sight.
Launched at the height of summer, AMD's Ryzen 9000X processors disappointed gamers who were hoping for more muscular chips for their favorite pastime. This overlooked the fact that the 9000X are designed more for applications and that, in the gaming field, AMD can rely on the excellence of the X3D series. Whether we're talking about the 5000X3D or the 7000X3D, they have always been at the forefront of gaming performance, while their pricing was much more in line with gamers' habits. Ryzen 9000X3D should be no exception.
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AMD takes great pleasure in shrouding the release of these Ryzen 9000X3Ds in a veil of mystery and, officially, they have not been announced/presented. Unofficially, however, the release of at least the first processor in the range is imminent. This is the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an 8-core model that can count on the presence of 3D Vertical Cache technology to stack cache memory chips and thus offer a combined cache of 104 MB! The latest rumors about this processor point to a presentation at the end of October, with launch and sale scheduled for November 7.
Ryzen 9000X3D vs Ryzen 7000X3D in games © HardwareLUXX/VideoCardz
More importantly, this rumor has been supplemented by a leak directly from MSI. The renowned motherboard manufacturer seems to have had its hands on Ryzen 9000X3D processors, which were logically compared with other AMD chips. Three sets were used here, and the Ryzen 9000X3D processors came out ahead of the Ryzen 7000X3Ds in the same category, but only by a short head. Thus, when the chips are paired with a GeForce RTX 4090 and the definition is FullHD, the Ryzen 9000X3Ds gain 2% to 4% on Black Myth: Wukong and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Far Cry 6, on the other hand, proves that things can get even better: we're talking about +11% for the 9950X3D and +13% for the 9800X3D compared with the 7950X3D and 7800X3D respectively. The test on Ubisoft's game proves that things can vary greatly depending on the graphics engines used.
Ryzen 9000X3D vs Ryzen 7000X3D on Cinebench R23 © HardwareLUXX/VideoCardz
Inevitably, some users will be disappointed to see that Ryzen 9000X3Ds don't do much better than 7000X3Ds, but the latter are still among the best processors for video games. So AMD has already managed to improve their scores, which isn't so bad! All the more so as, in addition to gaming performance, AMD was keen this time to make the X3D chips more versatile, and the Zen 5 architecture shows its full power here. In the Cinebench R23 test highlighted by MSI, we can see that the 16-core model (9950X3D) gains 9% in single-thread and 16% in multi-thread compared to the 7950X3D, while the 8-core (9800X3D) gains 18% in single-thread and even 28% in multi-thread compared to the 7800X3D.
Compared with the Ryzen 9000X - i.e. without 3D Vertical Cache - the differences are small, but the last part of MSI's test is above all an opportunity to show that energy efficiency seems to be on the side of the Ryzen 9000X3D. Of course, we'll need to see independent tests to corroborate these elements before getting too excited, but the Ryzen 9000X3Ds look set to be the most versatile processors to come along in the next few weeks, and to do so without blowing energy consumption out of the water. Interesting.
