X3D EXPLAINED

An X3D processor usually runs at lower clock speeds than the standard chip it's based on. It's also, in the right games, considerably faster. It sounds like a contradiction, but it is not, and the reason decides whether you should buy one.

The gain is real and it's conditional. In the right titles an X3D chip pulls well clear of a standard Ryzen of the same generation. In plenty of others the difference is a couple of frames, or nothing at all. What decides it is whether the processor is the thing holding your frame rate back in the first place. If your graphics card is already working flat out, no amount of cache will help. If the CPU is the bottleneck, and the game is one that hammers memory, the extra cache can be the single biggest upgrade available.

Cache is a small pool of very fast memory sitting on the processor itself, when the CPU needs a piece of data, it looks in cache first. If it's there, the data arrives almost instantly. If it isn't, the CPU has to fetch it from system RAM, which takes far longer in CPU terms. That trip is called a cache miss, and it's dead time.

Games generate a constant stream of these lookups. Positions of every object, AI states, physics, animation data, what's about to be drawn. On a standard chip a lot of that spills out of cache and into RAM.

AMD's 3D V-Cache stacks an extra 64MB layer of L3 cache directly onto the processor die, taking a chip like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D or 9800X3D to 96MB of L3 where a normal Ryzen 7 has 32MB. Three times the working space means far more of the game's data stays close to the cores. Fewer misses, less waiting, more frames.

That's the whole trick, and it's why those lower clock speeds don't cost what you'd expect. It isn't a faster processor in the usual sense. It just spends less of its time stalled.

The bigger and messier the data a game has to keep track of, the more the cache helps. 

Simulation and strategy titles benefit most. Flight sims, city builders, strategy games with thousands of units, factory games once the base gets large. These constantly walk through huge amounts of state, and on a standard chip they spend a lot of time waiting on RAM. Escape from Tarkov, heavily modded Minecraft, busy MMO hubs and racing sims with full grids all land in the same bracket. If that is what you play, our flight simulator PCs and racing simulator PCs are specified around it.

Open-world games are usually somewhere in the middle. Meaningful gains, not dramatic ones.

Fast corridor shooters and most esports titles are where the advantage narrows. The working set is small enough to fit in normal cache already, and at the frame rates those games run you're likely limited by the GPU or the monitor anyway.

The gain people notice most often isn't the average frame rate, it's the 1% lows, the worst moments. A large cache smooths out the stutters that happen when a game suddenly needs a lot of data at once, so a busy scene feels steadier rather than hitching. That's harder to put on a spec sheet than an average fps number, and it's more of what you actually feel while playing.

This is the part that gets skipped, and it's the one that determines whether your money is well spent.

At 1080p the CPU has to prepare frames very quickly, so it's often a limiting factor. That's where X3D gains are largest, and it's also why benchmark charts showing enormous differences are usually run at 1080p with a top-end graphics card.

At 1440p the picture is mixed and depends on the game and the card.

At 4K, with anything short of a flagship GPU, the graphics card is almost always the bottleneck. Two systems with identical cards and different processors will often land within a frame or two of each other. Buying an X3D chip specifically for 4K gaming is usually the wrong place to put the budget.

Which leads to the practical rule. If you're choosing between a stronger graphics card and an X3D processor, and you play at high resolution, take the graphics card. If you play at 1080p or 1440p on a fast monitor, especially in the games listed above, the X3D is the better half of the trade.

Both are eight-core chips on the AM5 platform with 96MB of L3, so the shape of the benefit is the same.

The 9800X3D is the newer Zen 5 part. AMD moved the cache layer underneath the cores rather than on top of them, which puts the cores nearer the cooler and lets the chip run at higher clocks than earlier X3D designs could manage. AMD's own figure for the gain over the previous generation is around 8% on average in games. Vendor numbers usually reflect favourable conditions, so treat that as the top of the range rather than what you'll see in every title. It's also the first X3D chip that's fully unlocked for overclocking.

The 7800X3D remains a strong buy and is the more sensible pick if the price gap is wide. You're not missing the mechanism, just some clock speed.

Every one of these is available in our AMD gaming PCs. The eight core parts sit mostly in Ryzen 7 gaming PCs, the twelve and sixteen core parts in Ryzen 9 gaming PCs, and the 7500X3D in Ryzen 5 gaming PCs.

One warning on the Ryzen 9 chips. On most of them only one of the two core clusters carries the extra cache, so performance depends on Windows scheduling your game onto the right cores. It generally works, and it's still more moving parts than an eight-core X3D chip, which has no such split. The 9950X3D2 addresses this by putting cache on both clusters. For gaming alone, a Ryzen 7 remains the cleaner and cheaper choice.

Not much, and it isn't free.

X3D chips do not help with work that is not cache limited. Video rendering, code compilation, batch exports and similar jobs care about core count and clock speed, and a standard Ryzen of the same price often does those a little faster. If your PC earns its keep on rendering rather than gaming, the extra cache is money spent on the wrong thing, and the CPU buyer guide covers what to buy instead.

You'll also pay a premium over the non-X3D version of the same chip. Whether that's worth it comes back to the same question as everything else here: which games, and at what resolution.

If you play simulation, strategy or heavily populated online games at 1080p or 1440p, and you've got a graphics card capable of pushing high frame rates, an X3D processor is one of the few upgrades that changes how a game feels rather than just how it benchmarks.

If you play at 4K, or mostly play graphically demanding single-player games, put the money into the GPU and pair it with a good standard processor instead.

Fierce builds X3D systems across the range, from balanced Ryzen 7 gaming PCs through to high end builds pairing a 9800X3D or 9850X3D with a top tier card. Ryzen 9 gaming PCs cover the higher core count options, and you can see everything in the AMD range. There are also bundles built around X3D chips if you want the monitor and peripherals alongside, and motherboard bundles if you are building yourself. If you would rather set the processor and graphics card balance yourself, use the PC configurator.