AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D On Linux: Not For Gaming, But Very Exciting For Other Workloads

Given the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is almost exclusively advertised by AMD as being a gaming processor -- and "the world's fastest PC gaming processor" at that -- benchmarks were first carried out to see how it serves for Linux gaming... Going into this I didn't expect to see any dramatic wins for Linux gaming and likely why I wasn't seeded by AMD for this launch.

I ran some benchmarks looking at the Ryzen 7 5800X vs. Ryzen 7 5800X3D while using a Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card and all other components the same across testing. Benchmarks were carried out on Ubuntu 22.04 with the Linux 5.17 kernel and Mesa 22.0-dev.

Here is a look at the games tested where there was a measurable difference either for or against the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Gaming with less than a 2% difference either way omitted.

With the exception of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the rest of the tests were a wash. The other games swayed 5% either way. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is one of the most demanding Linux-native OpenGL game ports and ported several years ago by Feral Interactive. Across the settings/resolutions tested there was up to a 36% improvement with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Shadow of the Tomb Raider did see some improvement to a lesser extent. But for DiRT Rally 2.00, HITMAN 3, Strange Brigade, Unvanquished, Total War Three Kingdoms, and various other benchmark-friendly games on Linux both by native game ports and Windows games running under Steam Play, the results were within just a few percent either way. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D as a reminder has a 400MHz lower base clock and 200MHz lower maximum turbo boost clock, which hurts the 5800X3D in areas not able to utilize the larger L3 cache. And from a consumer perspective, let's not forget the Ryzen 7 5800X3D currently retails around 34% more than the Ryzen 7 5800X, assuming you can find it in stock at suggested retail pricing.

When taking the geometric mean of all the Linux gaming benchmarks conducted, the results were basically a tie.

(Update: Forgot to include originally, for those interested see all the individual per-game and per-test power monitoring metrics via this OpenBenchmarking.org result page.)

For those wondering about the CPU power consumption, during the gaming benchmarks the Ryzen 7 5800X3D had a 47 Watt average and a peak recorded of 100 Watts (the TDP rating for the 5800X3D is 105 Watts).

So for Linux gamers, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D doesn't seem to make much sense unless there is magically a bunch of games that do happen to benefit from 3D V-Cache right now while in my testing was just the old Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Linux game port. Also keep in mind the significant cost difference in going for the 5800X3D.

But while this new CPU appears to not be compelling for Linux gaming, there are other areas showing much potential for this new consumer CPU with 3D V-Cache. Let's move on.