AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D review: faster than 13900K and 7950X3D for gaming?

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

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on 5 Apr 2023

We've run our CPU benchmarks this time around at 1080p and 1440p, as we rarely see prominent differences at 4K. (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 and DDR5-6000 CL30 memory for these results.

Our third page is all about FPS fps, with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The latter two are RT-enabled benchmarks, as creating the BVH structure for ray tracing actually has a significant CPU impact.

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. However, competitive-minded players still value high-end CPUs, as guaranteeing a strong and stable frame-rate up to and beyond the refresh rate of their monitors provides a critical boost to responsiveness. As monitors get faster - up to 500Hz these days - CPU requirements continue to climb.

Ryzen processors have historically performed well in CS:GO, but the 13900K actually recorded the fastest average frame-rate in our testing. It's a narrow margin of victory - just five percent - and also somewhat misleading, as the Ryzen processors are significantly better in terms of minimum frame-rates. Here, the 13900K's 144fps looks paltry compared to 226fps for the 7800X3D and 245fps for the 7950X3D, with the AMD CPUs providing a much smoother experience.

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.

Metro Exodus EE is easy to benchmark but often difficult to explain, with mid-range CPUs occasionally outperforming their higher-end counterparts - but in this shootout, I experienced even odder behaviour. The 7800X3D flew threw the test with flying colours, but the 7950X3D and 13900K both ran with visible stutters that brought the average frame-rate down below the 100fps mark. I eventually ran our tests after using Process Lasso to disable 'Dynamic Thread Priority Boost' for Metro, but the 7800X3D still vastly outperforms its rivals - to the tune of 18 percent over the 7950X3D and 43 percent over the 13900K.

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.

This is another game where the 3D V-Cache provides a boost, but a small one. So we see the 13900K coming within three to five percent of the two AMD contenders, while also having slightly better worst one percent performance - so we'll call that a better result for the 13900K than average!

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

We conclude our 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.