AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D review: cache money

As we mentioned earlier, our results are with DDR4-3600 CL16 RAM for our 11th-gen Intel and AMD platforms, with DDR5-5200 CL18 on the Intel 12th-gen side. Our CPUs are cooled with a large AiO (240mm or above). If you pair one of these CPUs with slower RAM or weaker cooling, then you are likely to see slightly worse performance - see page five for a look at RAM in particular.

In these tests, we'll examine how the 5800X3D behaves in one of the most controversial games of last year, 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 Digital Foundry 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. At 1080p, we see the 5600X and 5800X both around the 70fps mark, while the 5800X3D roars ahead to 91fps - a 30 percent advantage that puts the AMD processor in line with the Intel 12400F, admittedly with much faster DDR5 RAM. The 5800X3D is at least faster than Intel's best 11th-gen processor, the 11900K, which is the last Intel chip we tested with DDR4.

Far Cry 6

The single-core reliance from Far Cries past returns in FC6. Here, the 5800X3D out to do well and doesn't disappoint, with a 27 percent advantage over the 5800X. That's enough to tie with the 12700K and 12900K, which we tested with DDR5 RAM (worth about three percent extra performance on the 12900K). Overall, it's an impressive result for the new AMD processor.

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. Here, the extra cache present on the 5800X3D makes up for the lower frequencies, pushing the CPU in line with the more expensive 5950X and DDR5-equipped 12600K.

Now let's move onto one final diversion: testing the 5800X3D with slightly slower RAM - do we lose much performance? The next page reveals all.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D analysis

• Introduction, test rig and content creation benchmarks
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3
• Gaming benchmarks: Metro Exodus EE, Black Ops Cold War
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Crysis 3 Remastered
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D: the Digital Foundry verdict