AMD is coming under some fire for performance data it shared following its Computex 2024 keynote. Thankfully, the data in question doesn’t concern AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 9000 CPUs, which are slated to launch in July. Instead, it concerns the performance numbers AMD shared for its repackaged Ryzen 9 5900 XT and Ryzen 7 5800 XT CPUs, which are built on the aging Zen 3 architecture.
In a monthly Q&A, YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed broke down the performance numbers. In AMD’s presentation, it showed the Ryzen 9 5900 XT and Ryzen 7 5800 XT beating the Intel competition by a few points in games. AMD compared the CPUs to the Core i7-13700K and Core i5-13600K, respectively, and showed its CPUs beating Intel by upwards of 12% in some games. Hardware Unboxed says that data isn’t an accurate representation, however.
If you dig into the footnotes of AMD’s slides, you’ll find the configurations for these benchmarks. AMD tested these CPUs with the rather weak RX 6600 graphics card. This creates an environment where games are limited by the graphics card, meaning you’ll see little to no difference in performance when comparing two CPUs. And sure enough, short of a 12% increase in Cyberpunk 2077 on the Ryzen 7 5800 XT, all of the data AMD shared shows an increase of around 1% to 2%.
Hardware Unboxed pulled its own data for similar Zen 3 CPUs and found that the Core i7-13700K should be around 36% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900 XT when not constrained by the GPU. Similarly, it says the Core i5-13600K should be about 28% faster than the Ryzen 7 5800 XT. In our Core i5-13600K review, we found similar results, as you can see in the chart below. In Far Cry 6, for example, the Core i5-13600K was about 23% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, either. Intel’s 13th-gen chips use a much newer architecture than AMD’s Zen 3 offerings, and they can handle the newer DDR5 memory standard. No one would expect a Ryzen 5000 CPU to outperform an Intel 13th-gen CPU. Hardware Unboxed says it’s strange that AMD included performance data in the first place considering how much older Ryzen 5000 is compared to Intel’s more recent offerings.
In fairness to AMD, these new Ryzen 5000 parts weren’t the star of the show during AMD’s Computex keynote. In fact, they were barely a footnote. AMD didn’t share the data you see above during the presentation, nor did it even name the new Ryzen 5000 CPUs that are coming out. The performance data was instead shared privately with press. Taking a quick look around online, these slides — and the Ryzen 9 5900 XT and Ryzen 7 5800 XT as a whole — didn’t receive much attention.
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The keynote itself was instead focused on Ryzen 9000 and AMD’s upcoming Ryzen AI 300 processors for Copilot+ PCs. Although it’s never good to see misleading benchmarks, AMD likely has more problems with its new Zen 5 parts. AMD itself says they won’t beat last-gen’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D in gaming performance.
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