12 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2020NEWS ZEN 3-BASED RYZEN^9
games where a Ryzen 9 5900X matches or
exceeds a Core i9-10900K while gaming at
1080p with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU.
Among the games shown by AMD, the
flagship consumer Core i9-10900K exceeds
the Ryzen 9 5900X only in Battlefield V, but
not by much. In fact the Ryzen 9 5900 was
only 3 percent slower than the Core i9 chip.
Otherwise, AMD showed off performance
where the Ryzen 9 is typically 5 to 6 percent
faster. In a few less-intensive games, the Ryzen
9 5900X actually bests the Core i9-10900K—
by 21 percent in League of Legends, and 19
percent in Counter Strike: Global Operations.ZEN 3 ERASES THE
‘RYZEN GAP’
Perhaps more telling is the performance of the
Ryzen 9 5900X in Far Cry: New Dawn, wherethe Zen 3 chip is basically 2 percent faster.
You may think 2 percent isn’t impressive—but
that’s one title particularly indicative of the
“Ryzen gap” that has long plagued AMD in
gaming.
The Ryzen gap would typically cause
AMD to be 10 to 20 percent slower than an
Intel chip at games not limited by the GPU
performance. It’s been there since the first
Ryzen 7 1800X and has persisted through
Ryzen 2000 and Ryzen 3000. AMD’s new Zen
3, however, may finally have closed that gap.
That’s really bad news for Intel’s desktop
CPUs, which have been hanging by a
thread for years now. The one refuge Intel
has had is gaming performance. If AMD’s
claims are true, it leaves consumers with
little reason to buy an Intel CPU anymore
(go.pcworld.com/ltle).