AMD Ryzen 9 3900X And Ryzen 7 3700X Review: Zen 2 Impresses

For our next series of tests, we moved on to some game-related metrics with 3DMark, specifically the physics benchmark that's part of the Fire Strike test, along with a couple of actual games. For the 3DMark Physics test, we simply create a custom 3DMark run consisting solely of the physics test, which is CPU dependent, and report the results...

Gaming: 3DMark Physics Taking the GPU out of the Equation

I know we're started to sound repetitive at this point, but the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X put up some strong numbers in the 3DMark Physics tests a well. The Ryzen 9 3900X jumped into the pole position ahead of every other processor and the Ryzen 7 3700X easily dispatched the Core i9-9900K.

High Resolution Gaming And Graphics Tests 1080P and 4K Gaming With GeForce GTX 1080

We also ran some high-resolution game and graphics tests on our test rigs 3DMark, Middle Earth: Shadow Of War and Rise Of The Tomb Raider. We used 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme preset, and both of the games were run in two different configurations -- either 1080p with Medium details, or 4K with High/Very High details. The lower resolution tests are more CPU bound, while the higher resolution tests are more GPU bound.


In our "low-res" 1080p game tests, the Core i9-9900K retains its title as arguably the fastest gaming CPU available, though Tomb Raider can leverage some additional CPU resources, which result in a Core i9-9980XE win. Still, the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X finish near the top of the charts, well ahead of AMD's previous-generation processors.

Cranking the resolution up to 4K and increasing in-game image quality shifts the bottleneck to the GPU, and as such, things level out completely. For all intents and purposes, all of the platforms we tested tied in the 4K gaming tests. Alleviate the GPU bottleneck, however, and the spread would look more like the 1080p results. 


3DMark Fire Strike jibes with our high resolution game tests. Although there are some minor differences here and there, all of the platforms are tightly grouped, with the Core i9-9900K technically pulling off a first place finish.