Legit Reviews Benchmarks 50 Games to Crown a Gaming CPU King

[David_Schroth]

Legit Reviews has conjured up a rather legitimate review crossing the top 50 games on Steam in a throwdown that compares the Intel Core i9-9900K and the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X to see which reigns as the supreme gaming CPU.



What should you base your gaming PC build around? Should you go with an AMD or Intel processor? Today we are going to try to answer the CPU question by comparing the Intel Core i9-9900K to the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X on the top Steam game titles based on player base. This was an idea that we came up with around the time of CES 2020 well before the global pandemic and increased popularity of online gaming as well as eSports.Legit Reviews



It’s an interesting question to answer and a lot of Steam games to buy. Legit Reviews noted that this expedition was sponsored by Intel and Intel’s missive was for them to compare the CPUs based upon the most common resolution used on...

Continue reading...

 

[THUMPer]

"Sponsored by Intel"
"Not bad considering the platform used for the Intel Core i9-9900K ended up being 7.5% less expensive than the one for the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X processor. So, not only does Intel perform better in most all game titles, but it also does it at a considerably lower cost. "

I feel bad for intel. I'd rather see the same benches between intel and amd with their most POPULAR CPU's, not the most expensive. I would still get AMD though considering the AM4 platform has some longevity.

 

[JosiahBradley]

What a load of horse manure. 9900k versus a 3950x that cost 250$ more and then they claim the Intel system is cheaper... No ****. Using a 3800x is actually faster than the 3950x in some games due to not having to jump ccxs. It's proven in many benchmarks. Also tight timings from RAM boost the Ryzen systems farther than overclocking RAM on Intel and can be really neck and neck, especially at lower resolutions. 3rd party benchmarks mean you don't have the first party paying your bills... Duh. Anyone remember principal technologies?

 

[Zarathustra]

Yeah,

I didn't even need to read that to know the outcome.

They used steam HW survey to determine that 87% of Steam users play games at 1080p or below, but completely neglecting that this probably means most of them are on 60hz screens, then proceeded to do balls out several hundred FPS benchmarks, crowning a winner that ran at 502 fps over the runner up that ran at 470fps, which is a completely irrelevant distinction for someone on a 60hz screen.

They certainly put in a lot of effort, and I don't doubt their results, but this really does very little apart from muddying the waters for the readers who didn't already know all of this stuff...

The real conclusion here should have been.

1.) Practically insignificant differences for the 1080p or lower 60hz users on ALL titles.

2.) Practically insignificant differences in the overwhelming majority of the titles even if you do have a fancy 165hz G/Free-sync screen

3.) Unless you think there is a hugely significant difference between 145 and 165 fps the few titles in #2 above that did show a difference are really not relevant either.

The conclusion should be, for all practical intents and purposes it's a tie. Slight nod to Intel for scoring higher in ways that are not relevant, but overall, don't worry about it.

Yay for brown-nosing up to Intel to support their 14nm damage control "we are better at gaming" talking points. Are they on the Intel payroll?

Finally, if you are buying either of these CPU's because of your desire to support 1080p gaming or below at 60hz, you don't have clue what you are doing. Save your money. Keep using that Core i7-920, and save your money.

 

[Bloax]

I could RAMble a lot about how the most important thing for high-refresh gaming is not so much about how high your Average FPS is, but how consistent it is - and how much it doesn't drop below your monitor's refreshrate.

* special bonus for the quick: you can do this benchmark yourself by loading up the replay @ 6YBY7G
then watch the Torb on F4, as it's a convenient replay with lots of heavy **** going on for four minutes - and with no deaths to skew the data

Your choice of CPU is not particularly impactful - within reason, of course - to the last one, which sort of feeds into the first pointer too.

Fortunately, nobody seems to particularly give a **** because memory overclocking is the BIG SPOOK that for mythical reasons isn't important for your performance.
Reasons which I can only wager come from sandy + crap GPU days where framerates above 70 were unicorns, and the only Real Competitive™ titles were dinosaur titles like Quack 3 and early CS that run like a dream on anything newer than the hardware they were programmed for.

Lucky you and me, most titles chug like hell if you don't squeeze every penny out of your memory - and even a shockingly good running game like Doom 5

has inconspicuous spikes that I can only guess are Denuvo-related, except plenty of games have a worse baseline and slap more than Denuvo on top


but see, this isn't the place for me to RAMble a lot about **** nobody cares about.

and sure, I could do more bench runs than what I posted here - but why?
I don't need to bore myself to death for nobody's sake to gather data nobody but me will look at.

 

[Grimlakin]

Sponsored by Intel... only tested at 1080p.

Who the hell is building a 3 grand computer to run it at 1080p? I mean really? Why bother with a video card with 11gb of video memory if you're going to only run at 1080p. By this logic video card makers should have 4 gig 2080ti cards for 1080p competitive gamers with super fast memory. Then they could eek out every possible frame that their thousand dollar 1080p display can keep up with. Right?

Yet nobody does that because there is no market for it!

I wonder if you take that 1080p gaming resolution survey and compare it with CPU's what you end up with.

 

[Brian_B]

Yet nobody does that because there is no market for it!

I bet the folks with 240Hz + monitors would buy them. But I think that is probably a pretty small market niche

 

[Bloax]

If you buy into the Overpriced GPU + Overkill CPU combo and ignore what I just said, then you'll deserve what you get, too.

There's a reason "most people can't tell the difference between 240 Hz and 144 Hz", and it's not because there isn't one; it's because most games they'll try it in already struggle to maintain 144 FPS in high-action sequences ; )

 

[MacLeod]

Now do one with the $199 3600X. Would've given pretty much the same results but cost $500 less.

As for who is gaming at 1080p, well me and others that are in the 240 Hz club. I much prefer higher frame rates to higher resolution. I'll take 140 fps @ 1080 over 70 fps @ 1440 or 50 fps @ 4K any day.