AMD’s Ryzen 3000 processors are being heralded as the best consumer processors of this decade. Built atop the 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture, we got a markedly higher IPC, better single-core performance, faster clocks, and a large L3 cache. All this resulted in a massive uplift in terms of gaming performance among other improvements. Although other workloads like encoding, compression, content creation, and web browsing also saw healthy boosts, gaming was at the center of it all.

Over the past two generations, Intel had been touting its Coffee Lake CPUs as the absolute best hardware for PC Gaming but with 3rd Gen Ryzen, AMD has punched Team Blue right in the face. Most of the Ryzen chips perform within 5% of their Intel counterparts in DirectX 12 titles while crushing them by a notable margin in everything else. In this post, I’ve compiled a list of ten benchmarks highlighting the gaming performance of the Ryzen 7 3700X with the average FPS, the lows as well as the CPU and GPU power draw during these games.

Test Bench

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Motherboard: ASRock X570 Taichi

ASRock X570 Taichi Memory: Trident Z Royal 8GB x 2 @ 3600 MHz

Trident Z Royal 8GB x 2 @ 3600 MHz HDD: WD Black 4TB

WD Black 4TB PSU: Corsair HX1000i

Terminology

The average frame rates in a game give a relative measure of overall performance. They don’t account for the lags or FPS drops (if any) and as such can be misleading at times. 90th 95th and 99th percentile are used in tandem with the averages to make up for that shortcoming. The higher their values, the better the overall performance:

Average: This represents the average frame rate through the benchmark run.

This represents the average frame rate through the benchmark run. Min: The lowest FPS drop through the benchmark run.

The lowest FPS drop through the benchmark run. 90th percentile: 10 frames out of 100 are slower than this frame rate. 90% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.

10 frames out of 100 are slower than this frame rate. 90% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate. 95th percentile: 5 frames out of 100 are slower than this frame rate. 95% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.

5 frames out of 100 are slower than this frame rate. 95% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate. 99th percentile: 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Gaming Performance: Average FPS, Minimum and 99th Percentile

All the games were tested at 1080p using the in-game benchmark:

Assassins’ Creed Origins may be a CPU intensive game but it scales really well with multi-core CPUs. With 99th percentile of 80.5, the Ryzen 7 3700X delivers an incredibly smooth experience.

Ashes Escalation is another DX12 title that scales perfectly with higher core counts. Surprisingly, the lows here are worse off than in Assassins’ Creed.

Despite having post-launch performance issues, Borderlands 3 shows incredibly stable lows. 99th percentile value of 72 means that the minimum frame rate almost never dropped below 70 and yet the minimum frame rate recorded is just 6 FPS. On analyzing this, I noticed that this usually happened at the beginning or end of the benchmark, and sometimes during scene transition, rendering the metric obsolete.

Using ultra preset, Metro Exodus needs a TOTL GPU to sustain 60+ FPS even at 1080p. With an RTX 2080 Super, we got a 99the percentile of 38. That’s the worst out of all the ten games we tested.

It’s admirable how well-optimized Ubisoft’s PC ports are nowadays. Just a few years back, they were known for releasing half-baked, broken games. The Division 2 is one of the most well-performing games on this list with 99th percentile of 96 FPS.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands may be relatively old but it’s still one of the most demanding PC games. Even the mighty RTX 2080 Ti can’t deliver consistent 60 FPS at 1440p using the ultra preset. The 2080 Super is good for an average of 112 FPS at the very high preset @ 1080p.

CPU and GPU Power Draw

It’s remarkable how far AMD has come since the days of the old Bulldozer design. Here, you’ve got the Ryzen 7 3700X drawing just 40W in gaming (Metro) while the Core i7-9700K consumes well over 90W. That’s twice as much!

Conclusion

What I’ve noticed is that for gaming, the Ryzen 5 3600X/Core i5-9600K is the sweet spot for gaming. After that, you don’t see a whole lot of improvement as you move up the ladder. However, if your workloads are more versatile, the Ryzen 7 3700X is the most well-rounded chip. It’s slightly slower than the Core i7-9700K in gaming workloads but manages to beat even the i9-9900K in content creation and other non-gaming workloads.