Intel Core i9 9900K vs. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Linux Gaming Performance

The Ryzen 9 3900X performed well in staying up-to-speed with the Core i9 9900K but without any landslide victory for either company. With other Linux workloads that generally scale better, the Ryzen 9 3900X usually is able to handedly beat out the Core i9 9900K thanks to the extra cores/threads, but most Linux games still don't exploit many cores.

The area where the Ryzen 9 3900X does lose out for Linux gaming is on power efficiency with the ASUS X570 + 3900X setup coming out to around 50 Watts or so higher power consumption during the gaming tests based on the real-time power reading. (The RTX 2070 result here is only partial so can be ignored for this high-level graph due to Steam having crashed part-way through the testing with the Core i9 9900K and thus had to restart the test process.) I'll be investigating the Zen 2 Linux power usage more closely soon, hopefully in the next couple of days to see if it's due to missed optimizations / power management issue or something else.

Given the close pricing on the Core i9 9900K and Ryzen 9 3900X, the performance-per-dollar results aren't too surprising. Between the graphics cards, the Radeon RX 5700 XT tended to deliver better value than these RTX non-SUPER graphics cards for Linux gaming.

Lastly going back to the raw results, here is the geometric mean for all of the many OpenGL/Vulkan Linux game benchmarks carried out and the competitive performance between the 9900K and 3900X particularly with the RX 5700 XT and RTX 2080 graphics cards.