AMD Ryzen 5 7600 review: at what cost?

Counter-Strike: GO, Metro Exodus EE and Black Ops Cold War.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on 9 Jan 2023

We've run our benchmarks at the standard three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p and 4K, but we're focusing the bulk of our attention on those 1080p results, as this is where differences between different CPUs are most visible. (There's an argument for testing at 720p to make these deltas even more visible, but even mainstream PC gaming has long since moved onto 1080p.) We're using an Asus RTX 3090 Strix OC graphics card for these results.

This page is all about the fps you get in FPS games. Our trio of games in this section includes Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The latter two are RT-enabled benchmarks, as we examine performance in their single-player campaigns.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike remains the gold standard for competitive FPS, and is unique amongst our benchmark suite as it is a DirectX 9 title that can be played on even modest hardware at hundreds of frames per second. Regardless, serious players value a high and stable frame-rate, and going for a modern CPU like the ones we've tested can result in a much better experience when playing on a suitably high-refresh rate gaming monitor.

As we mentioned before, AMD Ryzen CPUs have done well here for the fast few generations, so it's not a huge surprise to see that repeated with the 7600. We're looking at performance in excess of 360fps, which places the 7600 ahead of every Intel CPU we've tested with two exceptions - the Core i9 13900K and the Core i9 12900K. For context, this is around a 20 percent improvement over last-gen 5600X and 5800X. There's no significant difference between the 7600X and 7600 here, either, and we see that faster RAM is also ineffective, with margin-of-error differences between the different runs.

CS:GO: DX9, Very High, AF off

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is an RT-only variant of the vanilla game, run here with DLSS engaged to uncouple the GPU and push the strain onto the CPU as much as possible. The test scene we're using comes from the very beginning of The Volga level, with Artyom and Anna discussing their hopes for the future before running into a hostile camp.

The 7600 performs well once again here, only one or two percentage points behind the 7600X. That also means we see a huge lead over Intel CPUs, with the 7600 even beating Intel's best 13th-gen parts by a 15 percent margin. This is another title that doesn't scale significantly with faster RAM, making base-spec DDR5-4800 the best value choice by far.

Metro Exodus EE: DX12, Ultra, RTX, DLSS Performance

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War comes next. Here, the focus is less on competitive performance and more on the single-player side of things, as we enable ray tracing and hop into one of the first campaign missions, Fracture Jaw. Interestingly, this mission has RT disabled on consoles, even when the option is enabled elsewhere in the game, suggesting that the BVH building process here is particularly tough. The opening scene, as Bell joins Adler on the fields of Vietnam, is heavy on the CPU at the relatively low graphical settings we've chosen.

Black Ops Cold War demonstrates some of the closest margins we've seen yet, with the 7600 essentially identical to the 7600X. That also places it amongst the 12600K, 12700K, 12900K, 13600K and 13900K, all of which record average frame-rates in the same plus-or-minus 5fps ballpark, with only the 7700X, 7900X and 7950X pushing beyond this at 1080p.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War: DX12, Low, TAA

We conclude our new standard gaming tests on the next page, where we take on Cyberpunk 2077 and two new editions of Digital Foundry favourites: Far Cry 6 and Crysis 3 Remastered.