AMD Ryzen of all generations compared in games and applications: the chip on Zen 3 turned out to be faster than Zen by more than 70%
The AMD Ryzen processor family debuted in 2016 with the Ryzen 7 1800X as the flagship 8-core and 16-thread solution. The maximum Turbo frequency for this processor was only 4.1 GHz, which is very far from what is currently available on some Ryzen processors. Then AMD updated the architecture of its processors more than once, and the German site Golem decided to compare four Ryzen CPUs of different generations.
The journalists tested four processors with the same configuration of 8 cores and 16 threads, but different architectures. All have been tested on X470 and X570 motherboards (depending on the processor supported). It should be borne in mind that the journalists set the memory frequency in accordance with the support of the corresponding AMD Zen architectures. The first generation only supported 2666 MHz memory by default, Zen + at 2933 MHz, and the last two generations (Zen 2 and Zen 3) supported DDR4 up to 3200 MHz. Memory frequency can have a big impact on the performance of AMD Ryzen processors.
According to Golem benchmarks, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X on Zen 3 offers an average of 80.9% better performance than the Ryzen 7 1800X in seven games – tested on Anno 1800 (Anno Engine), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Source Engine ), Microsoft Flight Simulator (Asobo Engine), Grand Theft Auto V (RAGE), Kingdom Come Deliverance (Cry Engine), Planet Zoo (Cobra Engine) and A Total War Saga: Troy (TWW2 Engine).
The processor on Zen 3 also turned out to be 72% faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X in regular applications – tests were carried out in 7-Zip (read archive), Adobe Premiere Pro (video rendering), Blender (Cycles, 3D rendering), Cinebench R15 / R20 (3D rendering), Faststone Image Viewer (image processing), Unreal Engine 4 (3D rendering) and y-Cruncher (AVX-512).
A more detailed table was compiled by 3DCenter journalists, taking into account individual results. According to their estimates, based on the same tests, Zen 3 is 89% faster than Zen in in-app testing and up to 84% in games. At the same time, each new generation of Zen, including even Zen +, brought from 16% to 27% performance gain:
AMD is expected to release new Zen 3+-based desktop processors codenamed Warhol sometime next year. They could still be part of the 5000 series or be renamed Ryzen 6000. Meanwhile, the first Zen 4-based processor should be released when AMD is ready to bring DDR5 memory support to desktop systems. The processors, codenamed Raphael, are expected to support the new memory technology as well as migrate to the new AM5 socket.
