After providing the first AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Linux benchmarks for many Linux gaming tests as well as nearly 400 other tests earlier this week, in today’s article I’m looking at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D as the 12-core / 24-threaded Processor with the hefty 128MB L3 cache on this Zen 4 desktop processor. Having had less time with the 7900X3D so far, today’s article will only start by looking at Linux gaming performance – both native Linux games and many Windows games powered by Valve’s wonderful Steam Play (Proton + DXVK / VKD3D- Proton) software.
The Ryzen 9 7950X3D is AMD’s top-end 3D V-Cache Zen 4 desktop processor with 16 cores / 32 threads, 5.7 GHz boost, 144 MB total cache and only 120 watts TDP. It’s a lot of performance for $699, especially for gaming, but there are many technical workloads where 3D V-Cache is beneficial, such as: But there are also cases where the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D is not as competitive as the 7950X due to the lower TDP and then the 3D V-Cache is only found on one of the two CCDs while the other is frequency optimized. As mentioned in this earlier article, the Linux kernel has yet to see any optimizations around AMD cache vs. frequency-optimized handling for tasks – apart from Linux users manually restricting tasks to specific core sets. In any case, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was great for Linux gaming, mightily impressive with the performance per watt, and also showed benefits for some of the other Linux workloads that could take advantage of the large cache.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D is largely in the same boat as the 7950X3D: Due to the cache vs. frequency-optimized CCDs, only half of the cores/threads have access to the large cache, which totals 140 MB on the 7900X3D. The Ryzen 9 7900X3D has 12 cores / 24 threads, up to 5.6 GHz boost clock, 4.4 GHz base clock, 768 KB L1 cache, 12 MB L2 cache and 128 MB L3 cache via 3D V-Cache. Like the 7950X3D, the 7900X3D has a TDP of 120 watts. In comparison, the Ryzen 9 7900X (non-3D) has a standard TDP of 170 watts, which in turn has a base clock of 4.7 GHz with up to a 5.6 GHz boost clock and 64 MB for its L3 cache size has.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D costs $599, while the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X costs around $450. The Ryzen 9 7900X3D was available on launch day, but at the time of writing two days later it seems to be out of stock at some US internet retailers and in limited quantities at others like NewEgg priced at $795 from third-party retailers.
As already mentioned, today’s article only deals with Linux gaming performance, while next week all remaining (non-gaming) Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and others will be published on Phoronix.
Page 1 – IntroductionPage 2 – System SetupPage 3 – HITMAN 3 + CS:GOPage 4 – Cyberpunk 2077Page 5 – DiRT Rally 2.0 + F1 22Page 6 – Portal 2 + Left 4 Dead 2 + Shadow of the Tomb RaiderPage 7 – Ryzen 9 7900X3D Linux Gaming
