Introduction

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090 was released this month and offers never-before-seen performance. In our launch day coverage of the RTX 4090, some readers pointed out that there might be some performance left on the table, because the Ryzen 7 5800X in our GPU test system wasn’t the latest and greatest CPU available. We investigated this in more depth in our RTX 4090 & 53 Games: Ryzen 7 5800X vs Core i9-12900K article.

The review we’re posting today serves as follow up to that testing. A lot of people have asked “but what about AMD?,” “I can haz 5800X3D plzplz”—so here we go.

In these mega benchmark articles, which we call “TPU 50” internally, we’re looking at interesting match-ups, be it graphics cards or processors, and compare them directly in a 1 vs 1 scenario. Roughly 50 games is double the number of games from our main graphics card reviews, which have 25. In this particular article, we are putting the GeForce RTX 4090 “Ada” through a massive 53 game tests, using our current graphics card test system, which is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-core/16-thread “Zen 3” processor, a machine we’ve been using since last year. This machine goes up against a Ryzen 7 5800X3D config, using AMD’s 3DV Cache stacking technology, which places an additional processor die with 64 MB of L3 cache in the CPU. Our original Ryzen 7 5800X3D review has more technical details.

The goal of this article is not to test “as equal as possible, only with different CPU,” but to compare “current GPU Test System” to a more modern config with Ryzen 5800X3D, which is the best Zen 3 CPU for gaming on the AMD Socket AM4, and we’ve equipped it with 32 GB DDR4 running at good memory settings of DDR4-3600 CL14—our readers have been asking for tighter memory timings. Infinity Fabric runs at 1:1 on both systems, which the best-performing config.

Our selection of games spans the past six years of game releases, across a plethora of game genres, game engines, and graphics APIs (DirectX 12, DirectX 11, Vulkan). Our testing data depicts performance gains, as well as losses for either side.

Benchmarks

Among our games, you’ll find titles that have been included in TechPowerUp graphics card reviews over the past years, as well as some of the newer ones joining our bench soon. Going forward, we will of course make changes to the game selection for TPU50. Our goal is to have a rich diversity of game genres, engines, and 3D graphics APIs. Equal settings were used for both platforms, with proprietary features disabled.

All games are tested in custom bench scenes as the integrated benchmarks often paint a completely inaccurate picture compared to actual gameplay. Also, the GPU vendors actively optimize their drivers to achieve good results in integrated benchmarks.

Test System

The goal of this review is NOT to test “5800X vs 5800X3D at similar config,” but “The current GPU Test System that I have right now, a decent but slightly aged config, vs 5800X3D the way you would build it today” to find out how much of a difference an upgrade can bring.