CPUs

This One Update Makes the Ryzen 9 7950X3D Faster by Over 30% in Gaming

AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X3D is, without a doubt, the fastest gaming CPU on the market. However, it doesn’t come without its fair share of issues. As explained in an earlier post, the asymmetrical design of the 7950X3D is a double-edged sword. While the second Zen 4 CCD allows it to stay relevant in compute-intensive workloads, it holds it doesn’t improve gaming performance.

While testing the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, we discovered that a single conspicuous update could reduce performance by 100 FPS at lower resolutions. Here’s a list of five titles where we felt this discrepancy the most:

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is hit the most, diving from 371 FPS to 288 FPS at 720p Ultra. Most other titles see a 20-30 FPS drop at this resolution. Games with ray tracing are minimally affected, although Shadow still records a discrepancy of 40 FPS or (>10%).

It’s worth noting that the above runs were done with a fresh installation of Windows 11 (latest Build), the latest AM5 BIOS version, Xbox Game Bar, and what we assumed was the latest chipset driver. Since it was a brand-new build, we expected the vendor provider “Control Center” to update all drivers to the latest. Unfortunately, certain items require individual approval, which includes the chipset. Therefore, if you plan to buy a Ryzen 9 7950X3D, ensure your chipset drivers are updated. It’s one of the few things Windows won’t do independently (barring the BIOS).

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