‘Tis the season for new gaming CPUs. While Intel gear up to release their efficiency-focused Core Ultra 200S chips, AMD have announced a November 7th launch date for their Ryzen 9000X3D series – the latest to use their framerate-juicing 3D V-Cache. No specific CPUs have been named, for some reason, but we can be reasonably sure from leaks and retail listing whoopsies that this launch will include at least one of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Ryzen 9 9900X3D, and Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
3D V-Cache, if you’re not up to date on your processor jargon, is AMD’s method of squeezing more games performance out of their higher-end CPUs (outside the usual core count/clock speed/instructions-per-clock gubbins). Simply put, it massively expands the amount of onboard memory that the CPU has to work with, allowing it to store and therefore access more data at higher speeds than if it had to get off its silicon arse and fetch that data from the PC’s main RAM sticks. I’ve semi-retired from CPU reviews these days, but our pals at Digital Foundry have found that this cache-stacking really does make for faster gaming chips. The fastest, no less.
Interestingly, Intel have seemingly given up on trying to match this level of performance: they’ve been pretty upfront about how the Core Ultra 200S family isn’t really much faster than the previous 14th or 13th Core generations, instead refocusing on making the new chips run cooler and quieter while sucking drastically less power out of your PC. This essentially gives the Ryzen 9000X3D range a free run at the framerates-at-all costs crowd, which is certainly an unusual turn for the Intel-AMD rivalry to take, though it’ll still need to significantly outpace the existing Ryzen 7000X3D chips to be worth buying.
That’s actually an issue that the non-X3D Ryzen 9000 processors – which have been out since the summer – have been facing as well, with models like the Ryzen 7 9700X unable to convincingly beat the older 7800X3D in games. These are, however, getting across-the-board price cuts for the holiday season: the Ryzen 5 9600X is £19 / $30 off, the Ryzen 7 9700X is £30 / $29 off, the Ryzen 9 9900X is £30 / $30 off, and the Ryzen 9 9950X is £49 / $49 off. They’re there if you want them, though waiting until the 7th sounds like the wiser plan to me.