AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D Linux Gaming Performance
After earlier this week providing the initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D across many Linux gaming tests as well as nearly 400 other tests, in today's article I am looking at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D as the 12-core / 24-thread processor with the hefty 128MB L3 cache on this Zen 4 desktop processor. Due to having less time with the 7900X3D thus far, today's article is just getting things started in looking at the Linux gaming performance -- both native Linux games as well as many Windows games running on Linux thanks to 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, 5.7GHz boost, 144MB total cache, and just a 120 Watt TDP. It's a lot of power at $699 USD especially for gaming but there are many technical computing workloads where the 3D V-Cache is beneficial like OpenCFD computational fluid dynamics, some AI related workloads, and more as shown in that prior Phoronix article. But there are also cases where the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D isn't as competitive as the 7950X due to the lower TDP and then the 3D V-Cache being found on just one of the two CCDs while the other is frequency optimized. As noted in that prior article, the Linux kernel hasn't seen any optimizations yet around the AMD cache vs. frequency optimized handling for tasks -- short of Linux users manually restricting tasks to given sets of cores. In any event the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was great for Linux gaming, mighty impressive with the performance-per-Watt, and also showed gains for some of the other Linux workloads able to take advantage of the large cache.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D is much in the same boat as the 7950X3D: due to the cache vs. frequency optimized CCDs, only half the cores/threads have access to the big cache, which for the 7900X3D comes in at a combined 140MB. The Ryzen 9 7900X3D is 12 cores / 24 threads, up to a 5.6GHz boost clock, 4.4GHz base clock, 768KB L1 cache, 12MB L2 cache, and 128MB L3 cache via 3D V-Cache. Like the 7950X3D, the 7900X3D also has a 120 Watt TDP. In comparison the Ryzen 9 7900X (non-3D) has a 170 Watt default TDP that in turn has a 4.7GHz base clock with up to 5.6GHz boost clock, and 64MB for its L3 cache size.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D launched at $599 while the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X retails for around $450 USD. There was launch-day availability on the Ryzen 9 7900X3D but as of writing two days later it appears to be out-of-stock at some US Internet retailers and limited quantities at others like NewEgg showing a $795 price-tag from third-party sellers.
As mentioned today's article is just looking at the Linux gaming performance while next week all the rest of the (non-gaming) Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and others will be published on Phoronix.