Our testing shows the Ryzen 7 9800X3D can match the pricier Ryzen 7 9850X3D with simple PBO settings
With Denuvo out of the way, let’s get into the interesting bits of this testing: the benchmarks. Requiem has both first- and third-person camera perspectives, but I didn’t notice a significant performance gap between them. Still, I tested with the first-person camera as the majority of the opening hours of the game are in the first-person perspective. I chose a scene early on, shortly after you’re let loose from scripted sequences and handed the first major escape room-style puzzle of the game.
I used the CPU test bench I use for reviews for these test passes, which includes some specific settings and hardware choices I’ll detail below. For now, the important bit is that I used an RTX 5090 FE to isolate CPU performance as much as possible and prevent any GPU bottlenecks. I also ran multiple passes (three to five) of the same sequence with each chip to make sure the results were solid. The results below aren’t an average of those; I instead chose the median result.
As expected, AMD’s X3D chips top the charts, but there’s a little more to the story with Requiem. You can see the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Ryzen 7 9800X3D , and Ryzen 5 7600X3D all posted nearly identical results, both across average frame rates and 1% lows. Requiem favors extremely fast data access and punishes small differences in latency. There’s great evidence of that with the Ryzen 9 9950X . Both the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X posted clearly higher performance, exposing the inter-CCD latency of AMD’s 16-core flagship.
You can see similar results on the Intel side of things. With Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh, you see about a 10% jump in performance when moving from the 14-core Core i5s to the 16- or 20-core Core i7s. The Core i7s both have larger cache pools, notably a larger shared L3 cache. That seems like the linchpin for CPU performance in this game. The Core i7-14700K and Core i7-13700K posted almost identical performance, despite the Raptor Lake Refresh chip boasting a higher core count and higher boost clocks.
Cache is king in Requiem, which shows up everywhere from multiple generations of Intel chips to the top three X3D chips, where we’d expect to see scaling, but otherwise see a flat performance wall.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) Looking at other aspects of performance, we can see that higher clocks don’t translate into better performance. Higher power consumption as a result of those clocks, and boosted core counts, doesn’t account for much, either. Finally, looking at efficiency, you can see the X3D chips absolutely run away with performance, with the Ryzen 5 7600X3D standing out as the true star with chart-topping results.
Although I would’ve liked to test more chips and drill down on memory speeds, in particular, that wasn’t possible due to Denuvo in the short window I had to test before launch. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell if you need a new token with system configuration changes without running into the five-device limit and locking yourself out of the game for a day.
If you’ve read any of our CPU reviews , the test bench should be familiar here. We used the same bench with nearly identical OS images across the Intel and AMD platforms, short of the drivers specific to those platforms. We also tested with the RTX 5090 FE running at stock settings.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/testing-cpu-scaling-in-resident-evil-requiem-and-why-we-werent-able-to-finish-the-job#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.