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RTX 5090 4K Gaming build - Core Ultra 265K tuned vs 9800X3D - Talk me out of or for returning my 265K parts and getting 9800X3D parts at microcenter

W

Wolverine2349

Weaksauce
Joined
May 30, 2016
Messages
85
Money is little to no object in this case just to start off

Ok I sold off my Raptor Lake 14700K parts due to degradation fears months and months down the road as lots say even microcode update its just a band aide. And I really do not want to go through warranty garbage with Intel to repeat process again

Ok so I got a great deal on 265K for $239 as most places have good deals for $259 but MC has $20 off it and 9800X3D for $239.99 and $459.99 instead of $479.99 respectively. However I just spent $673 on an MSI Z890 Unify-X to ensure high quality stable 8400 RAM speed. But I returned that unopened to Amazon and returned the 8400 RAM for 8000 RAM and went with MSI Z890 Tomahawk instead.

Now I know I know all the benchmarks say 9800X3D slams the 265K in almost all games. I kind of wanted more than 8 cores even if all I mostly do is play games. I liked the extra headroom though maybe overthinking it. Like future proofing as it seems games may become more aware of more cores especially since the cores in 15th Gen are just as if not slightly more powerful than 9800X3D. Its just that 9800X3D has the huge L3 cache which gives it its advantage not that the lesser cores have better IPC or clocks.

Though numbers cannot really lie can they? Or can they. Many have stated well AMD feels less responsive and smooth? Though some succumb and say it is FUD.

Also hear AMD is more buggy especially X3D parts and AMD Drip and how NVIDIA drivers do not play nice especially with mouse polling on 9800X3D? Was that FUD or an issue and is it now fixed??

Also hear AMD more buggy and less reliable platform compared to Intel? Is that true or just more FUD?
 
What's the refresh on that 4K monitor? Unless it's 240+, or unless you are very very fps sensitive, I rather suspect that you will see zero subjective improvement with the 9800X3D. At 4K, you are much more likely to be either monitor or GPU limited rather than CPU limited.
 
pitingres said:
What's the refresh on that 4K monitor? Unless it's 240+, or unless you are very very fps sensitive, I rather suspect that you will see zero subjective improvement with the 9800X3D. At 4K, you are much more likely to be either monitor or GPU limited rather than CPU limited.
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I have 2. 120Hz 4K OLED 40 inch TV and 144Hz 4K 27 inch main monitor.
 
Dreamerbydesign said:
There is just no comparison except maybe if you had some non gaming use and even then it’s a toss.

9800x3d and be happy. You’re overthinking especially if money is no object.
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For non gaming stuff that scales with more than 8 cores is it really a toss. I mean more a slaughter in favor of Intel. Its not like the cores on 9800X3D even if only 8 of them are strnger than Intel P cores on Arrow Lake unlike past situations where Intel won in games so easily with 4 core parts vs higher core Zen 1 parts et alone Exacuvator 8 core AMD parts that had far worse IPC/clock speed

IPC and clock speeds of Zen 5 and Lion Cove is close.

Its the fact that AMD has the 96MB L3 cache on 9800X3D that makes all the difference in games.

Just not crazy about having only 8 cores when I can get more cores of same power. Just a shame Intel does not do lots of L3 cache. And do not like the dual CCD with one L3 cache CCD and other normal. Not crazy about vanilla dual CCD parts either and prefer more lower power cores with no HT on P cores. I had that with 14700K, but the degradation and instability fears made me sell it.

AMD masked the poor latency of infinity fabric by 96MB L3 cache which games love.

Intel had monolithic die before Arrow Lake and its latency was so much better than AMD

Then tile based design increased it a lot which hurt though tuned still better than AMD IF. But 13th and 14th Gen B0 8 + 16 die degrade and are a faulty failure prone silicon level design
 
Wolverine2349 said:
For non gaming stuff that scales with more than 8 cores is it really a toss. I mean more a slaughter in favor of Intel. Its not like the cores on 9800X3D even if only 8 of them are strnger than Intel P cores on Arrow Lake unlike past situations where Intel won in games so easily with 4 core parts vs higher core Zen 1 parts et alone Exacuvator 8 core AMD parts that had far worse IPC/clock speed

IPC and clock speeds of Zen 5 and Lion Cove is close.

Its the fact that AMD has the 96MB L3 cache on 9800X3D that makes all the difference in games.

Just not crazy about having only 8 cores when I can get more cores of same power. Just a shame Intel does not do lots of L3 cache. And do not like the dual CCD with one L3 cache CCD and other normal. Not crazy about vanilla dual CCD parts either and prefer more lower power cores with no HT on P cores. I had that with 14700K, but the degradation and instability fears made me sell it.

AMD masked the poor latency of infinity fabric by 96MB L3 cache which games love.

Intel had monolithic die before Arrow Lake and its latency was so much better than AMD

Then tile based design increased it a lot which hurt though tuned still better than AMD IF. But 13th and 14th Gen B0 8 + 16 die degrade and are a faulty failure prone silicon level design
Click to expand...

The next series from AMD are rumored to have a core increase in their x3d chips…


And also the 9950x3d is available. Plenty of cores, same gaming experience as the 9800x3d.

Honestly if you’re looking for the best of both worlds that is it. Seems like you’re trying to justify some use for the intel setup. Really Intel is in a real bad place right now with CPU’s. Think AMD bulldozer era type stuff.

Go with the 9950x3d and really you’d be all set.
 
Dreamerbydesign said:
The next series from AMD are rumored to have a core increase in their x3d chips…


And also the 9950x3d is available. Plenty of cores, same gaming experience as the 9800x3d.

Honestly if you’re looking for the best of both worlds that is it. Seems like you’re trying to justify some use for the intel setup. Really Intel is in a real bad place right now with CPU’s. Think AMD bulldozer era type stuff.

Go with the 9950x3d and really you’d be all set.
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I hate the dual CCD setup and scheudling quirks. Intel has all cores on one node and a thread director.

No core parking crap where it sleeps other CCD using XBOX Game bar when gaming and thus games still cannot use more than 8 cores for the games that benefit. Its only productivity when not gaming all cores available and still separate CCDs at that though not as big of a deal but still.

Intel in a bad place with CPUs like AMD bulldozer. Oh while AMD has an edge its not even close to AMD Bulldozer.

Bulldozer had like 40-50% worse IPC than Sandy Bridge and ran hotter too.

Intel has same IPC as AMD. They just borked interconnect latency. Not even close to Bulldozer vs AMD situation.

I also have come around to liking e-cores as replacement for SMT/HT and you get that on intel. They had it with Raptor Lake chips but those degrade and are defective instable like a paper tiger. Only 8 + 16 die so could not keep it.
 
The reality is that you are hard limited to 144 fps by your faster monitor (you can't see frames that happen faster). I suppose that you can find games that you can a) cause to be CPU limited by turning down graphics settings, or even by the nature of the game; b) run poorly enough with the Ultra CPU such that the 9800X3D gets you a subjectively real boost (and by that I mean for instance under 60 fps to well over); and c) that you care to play.

The other arguments about CCD vs Intel tiling, inter-CCD latency, etc are way more theoretical than practical, IMHO. Ultra isn't a bad CPU at all; it got a vile reputation because of a stupidly premature launch and ridiculously high launch pricing. The CPU itself is entirely competitive from a performance standpoint in most cases; and when it isn't, you're likely to find that it's not the limiting factor anyway.
 
If you're not a hardcore FPS player you'll likely never be able to tell the difference. If you are like me and are fine with 144hz you'd be throwing your money away on a faster platform. Heck even your 5090 is arguably overkill. Depends how much money you want to throw at the rig, and how much you care about having high end parts that may or may not make a meaningful difference in performance depending on what type of games you play. I play FPS shooter games so for me I don't need to spend a penny on my system for over 5 years easily. If you play story driven games and like the graphics turned up then a 4090 or 5090 is understandable. High FPS is overrated in my opinion. Not to mention the additional heat that you activate turning your machine into a fire breathing dragon literally sweating your balls off lol. I can play at 300-500 fps but it's simply not worth it. I am higher than top 5% worldwide at 144hz. Throwing more money at the machine won't make you a better player lol. Put your use case into perspective. Unless the fun is building it with best parts tickles your fancy or like me you want it to last a loooong time.
 
xDiVolatilX said:
If you're not a hardcore FPS player you'll likely never be able to tell the difference. If you are like me and are fine with 144hz you'd be throwing your money away on a faster platform. Heck even your 5090 is arguably overkill. Depends how much money you want to throw at the rig, and how much you care about having high end parts that may or may not make a meaningful difference in performance depending on what type of games you play. I play FPS shooter games so for me I don't need to spend a penny on my system for over 5 years easily. If you play story driven games and like the graphics turned up then a 4090 or 5090 is understandable. High FPS is overrated in my opinion. Not to mention the additional heat that you activate turning your machine into a fire breathing dragon literally sweating your balls off lol. I can play at 300-500 fps but it's simply not worth it. I am higher than top 5% worldwide at 144hz. Throwing more money at the machine won't make you a better player lol. Put your use case into perspective. Unless the fun is building it with best parts tickles your fancy or like me you want it to last a loooong time.
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We have more or less opposite preferences in games, but you just nailed my thoughts on this. I haven't played a PvP FPS game in ages. I figured out a couple decades ago I just wasn't into that sort of game enough to ever be good at it. I like story driven RPGs and strategy games. The strategy games don't take much but some of the RPGs try to melt a 5090. I might like an MMO if I didn't have this thing called work getting in the way. I figured out a long time ago that I don't need the fastest proc or the highest FPS for what I play. My 5090 could be faster though. It can't do path tracing at 4k without at least DLSS quality, and I like the bling.
 
9950x3d. Done.

The scheduling issues are mostly resolved now in multiple reviews I've watched for the 9950x3d. This means dual ccd issues are solved. And really, that should have been an easy solve all along. It doesn't disable one of the CCD's for gaming, that's Gigabytes "Turbo x3d" or whatever... that's pretty much unnecessary at this point and no one should enable it.
9950x3d equals or beats 9800x3d in games, and smokes it in productivity. Smokes the 285k as well in both. Costs more tho. Pair it with a well reviewed x870e mobo (Asus x870e crosshair hero). ddr5-6000 cl26, or ddr5-8000 (look for expo kits). The 8000 came out ahead in gaming in a few of the reviews I saw for that, but the ddr5-6000 cl26 equaled or nearly equaled the 8000 most of the time. Also expensive but not as much. Or buy both ram speeds to try them out.
Buying the Intel is likely (hopefully) back to a stable system, but there is 40% gains to be had all around with a 9950x3d.


I'm running a 9800x3d and didn't even bother with a fresh install, came from a 10900x. x870e finally had just enough pcie lanes that I could switch to AMD. Some are shared (systemboard devices with nvme slot 5) but it's fine, still plenty fast on that nvme. System has been rock solid.

I ran Intel since i7-920 days, and I am happy with the 9800x3d.
 
DF-1 said:
that guy is right.
at 4k the CPU becomes a whole lot less important. Check out legit benchmarks like TPU.
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It really depends on the game. Most games won't be CPU bound at 4K, but there are some that are. Even my 9950X3D & 9800X3D can't keep my 5090 & 4090 fully fed in Star Citizen at 4K in some areas.

Then there is the whole discussion about game devs putting less and less time into optimizations and relying more on DLSS and frame generation to fill that gap. UE5 can be pretty bad as many have found out.
 
arestavo said:
It really depends on the game. Most games won't be CPU bound at 4K, but there are some that are. Even my 9950X3D & 9800X3D can't keep my 5090 & 4090 fully fed in Star Citizen at 4K in some areas.

Then there is the whole discussion about game devs putting less and less time into optimizations and relying more on DLSS and frame generation to fill that gap. UE5 can be pretty bad as many have found out.
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sure, you can find specific exmaples.
but these first 2 images is what i'm talking about:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/20.html
a 5% difference between several generations is not much to talk about.

Better off saving money or buying the absolute fastest GPU possible + OC it.
 
arestavo said:
That's great for many people. Can't say that works for me 😉
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not sure what that means,
but seeing as you're at a 5090 OC with too much RAM, saving money doesn't apply to you if you're looking for that extra 2-3%.
...which is what I said.

it does to someone who bought a 265k.
 
DF-1 said:
not sure what that means,
but seeing as you're at a 5090 OC with too much RAM, saving money doesn't apply to you if you're looking for that extra 2-3%.
...which is what I said.

it does to someone who bought a 265k.
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2 to 3%? You quite obviously don't play Star Citizen. Which I've seen use 48GB for SC alone, per process.

Stop assuming, please - and thank you. However, if you'd like to continue being clueless as to the ~20% increase I saw going from a 7800X3D to a 9800X3D (can't speak to a 265K which is slower) and a 4090 at 4K, please do so. I haven't ignored someone in a while.

Actually, bone that noise. Good bye.
 
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Own both, play games on both. 1440P with a 4090, there is almost no difference at all except in specific games like BG3 which I don't play. 265K gets way better 1% lows in almost everything I normally play. Techtubers basically only shill AMD products so its really hard to gauge reality based on their reviews, so when there was a deep sale I picked it up to test for myself. Bear in mind, my systems are max tuned (although there isn't much tuning to be done on AMD outside of PBO+200 and memory/fabric tuning).

If you play competitive esports at 720p ultra-low sweaty balls settings, the 9800X3D is way, way better and some things like MSFS which love the 3D cache. For normal 1440p or 4k gaming there isn't much difference... just like there isn't much difference between a 9800X3D and the 9600X. Even HUB seems to have finally admitted this recently and put out a video about it. Right tool for the job, now that 9800X3D prices have come down some and its in stock there isn't much reason not to get it since it covers more bases though and its easier to use out of the box.
 
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For the folks interested, I managed to find someone that did some testing with both a stock and tuned 265K (6000/8000MT/s) and 9800X3D (6000MT/s) in Star Citizen. It's 1440P and a 5080, and not 4K and a 4090/5090, yet a 5080 is close enough to a 4090. Not a lot of folks testing in SC since it's an alpha on top of being an MMO with different servers and patches that can absolutely change results. And I won't blow off anyone's personal experience since folks can and do put it tons of tuning work that most folks aren't interested in doing (memory tuning and testing is something that I really don't like putting the required work in).


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGGvvXyZzgY
 
arestavo said:
2 to 3%? You quite obviously don't play Star Citizen. Which I've seen use 48GB for SC alone, per process.

Stop assuming, please - and thank you. However, if you'd like to continue being clueless as to the ~20% increase I saw going from a 7800X3D to a 9800X3D (can't speak to a 265K which is slower) and a 4090 at 4K, please do so. I haven't ignored someone in a while.

Actually, bone that noise. Good bye.
Click to expand...

I'm sure the three scam citizen players really care (that OP never mentioned)
Like I said
DF-1 said:
sure, you can find specific examples.
but these first 2 images is what i'm talking about:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/20.html
a 5% difference between several generations is not much to talk about.

Better off saving money or buying the absolute fastest GPU possible + OC it.
Click to expand...
last reply to you, no reading comprehension.

and then you follow up with a 1440p comparison.
3,686,400 pixels vs 8.3 million for 4k. Yeah, totally not a big diff. lmao
 
Well thanks for help everyone.

I decided afterall to return the Core Ultra 265K parts and go 9800X3D.

Simply gaming is a blowout in favor of AMD and Intel CPUs not in a good place right now.

And games probably not gonna benefit much if at all from more than 8 cores anytime soon if ever.

Any coincidence the 5800X3D aged so much better than the higher core count 5900X and 5950X and the 10900K for even CPU intensive games.

And its not like high core count CPUs more than 8 cores are brand new. AMD has had CPUs on mainstream with more than 8 cores (!2 core 3900X) for 6 years now and had 16 cores for near 6 years since late November 2019 with Zen 2.

And intel has had 10 core Comet Lake for more than 5 years.

So it isn't as if game devs have not had time to catch up.

As for the future who knows?? Though maybe it was easy to program games jumping from 1 to 2 cores then 2 to 4 as Core 2 Quads aged much better than Core 2 Duos. But maybe the jump form 4 cores to more is just much harder. And its more than the long stagnation of Intel Quad cores on mainstream DIY market for a decade as we are in 2025 and last 5+ years we have had more than 8 cores on mainstream yet the older lower end parts have aged far worse than 5800X3D.

Yes some rarer games may marginally or modestly benefit from more than 8 cores, but whatever?? The options available just not interested and cannot overthink it.
 
arestavo said:
For the folks interested, I managed to find someone that did some testing with both a stock and tuned 265K (6000/8000MT/s) and 9800X3D (6000MT/s) in Star Citizen. It's 1440P and a 5080, and not 4K and a 4090/5090, yet a 5080 is close enough to a 4090. Not a lot of folks testing in SC since it's an alpha on top of being an MMO with different servers and patches that can absolutely change results. And I won't blow off anyone's personal experience since folks can and do put it tons of tuning work that most folks aren't interested in doing (memory tuning and testing is something that I really don't like putting the required work in).
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I wouldn't even need to play it to guess that the X3D chips are leagues ahead of everything else in this game. Like I said, right tool for the right job. To be totally fair now, the 9800X3D and the 265K aren't even in the same price bracket, there is a $200 gap. The Ultra 7 would be compared to like a 7700X at this point. Which is fine, it does its job at that price. The 285K at over $500 is ridiculous though. Other than for workstation stuff (which I'm pretty sure the 9950X beats it anyways) this thing is useless.

I sure hope Intel manages to pull out of the slump though, because Zen 5 left AMD wondering where the supposed performance gains even were and I don't want generations of that in the future.
 
LigTasm said:
I wouldn't even need to play it to guess that the X3D chips are leagues ahead of everything else in this game. Like I said, right tool for the right job. To be totally fair now, the 9800X3D and the 265K aren't even in the same price bracket, there is a $200 gap. The Ultra 7 would be compared to like a 7700X at this point. Which is fine, it does its job at that price. The 285K at over $500 is ridiculous though. Other than for workstation stuff (which I'm pretty sure the 9950X beats it anyways) this thing is useless.

I sure hope Intel manages to pull out of the slump though, because Zen 5 left AMD wondering where the supposed performance gains even were and I don't want generations of that in the future.
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Yeah inte is a mess right now and bad place regarding CPUs. Is it as bad as Bulldozer even in gaming. No, but its not far off compared to AMD AM5 X3D parts. Productivity not even close to as bad as Bulldozer. Though extra power draw and extra heat dumped into case not good.

And though Arrow Lake gaming performance held back badly by its terrible memory subsystem, the cores are actually way better than Bulldozer cores. Though even so Lion Cove regardless of memory subsystem did seem to regress on gaming with certain back end stuff not for the better.

But guess does not matter how they got there. Arrow Lake is almost though not quite as bad as Bulldozer for gaming compared to 9800X3D whether the cores themselves or memory subsystem. Cores were not designed well to compensate for memory subsystem so its kind of all together.
 
LigTasm said:
I wouldn't even need to play it to guess that the X3D chips are leagues ahead of everything else in this game. Like I said, right tool for the right job. To be totally fair now, the 9800X3D and the 265K aren't even in the same price bracket, there is a $200 gap. The Ultra 7 would be compared to like a 7700X at this point. Which is fine, it does its job at that price. The 285K at over $500 is ridiculous though. Other than for workstation stuff (which I'm pretty sure the 9950X beats it anyways) this thing is useless.

I sure hope Intel manages to pull out of the slump though, because Zen 5 left AMD wondering where the supposed performance gains even were and I don't want generations of that in the future.
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Actually, if one overclocks and tunes the piss out of a 14900K/KS (CPU and RAM), one can actually get it faster than a 9800X3D since Star Citizen does like memory bandwidth. But it takes a lot of doing and most folks aren't going to be able to get there - mainly because SC is quite sensitive to even slightly unstable overclocks that wouldn't be an issue in other games.

That's part of what makes the 9800X3D so popular - it doesn't take much to get the best performance.

Hopefully Intel has gotten a clue, and we'll see them coming out with similar (and hopefully not at 253+W stock).
 
arestavo said:
Actually, if one overclocks and tunes the piss out of a 14900K/KS (CPU and RAM), one can actually get it faster than a 9800X3D since Star Citizen does like memory bandwidth. But it takes a lot of doing and most folks aren't going to be able to get there - mainly because SC is quite sensitive to even slightly unstable overclocks that wouldn't be an issue in other games.

That's part of what makes the 9800X3D so popular - it doesn't take much to get the best performance.

Hopefully Intel has gotten a clue, and we'll see them coming out with similar (and hopefully not at 253+W stock).
Click to expand...


Well tuned Raptor Lake is great. Though to get there, the thing probably not totally stable and will degrade easily, and power will go through the roof that it will need exotic cooling. Heck even at more modest settings degradation risk is still there big time even with latest microcode. Latest microcode just slowed down degradation and helped not sure it really fixed longterm problem.

Its a shame Intel made Arrow Lake regress so much in gaming compared to Raptor Lake. The Lion Cove cores IPC regressed for backend stuff making gaming IPC worse per Cheese and Dips along with tile based latency of memory subsystem makes it a mess for gaming. Though I think tile based latency and memory subsystem is the biggest problem by far.
 
Wolverine2349 said:
Its a shame Intel made Arrow Lake regress so much in gaming compared to Raptor Lake. The Lion Cove cores IPC regressed for backend stuff making gaming IPC worse per Cheese and Dips along with tile based latency of memory subsystem makes it a mess for gaming. Though I think tile based latency and memory subsystem is the biggest problem by far.
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You say all this but have you actually gamed on it?
 
I went from very well tuned 14900K to 9800X3D and it was a blatant upgrade in every way.

For one thing, Hyperthreading actually improves gaming performance. The fact Arrow lake has it essentially 'disabled' tells you everything you need to know. Intel did like a stupid kid and dropped the ball then kicked it into their own stupid face.
 
spine said:
I went from very well tuned 14900K to 9800X3D and it was a blatant upgrade in every way.

For one thing, Hyperthreading actually improves gaming performance. The fact Arrow lake has it essentially 'disabled' tells you everything you need to know. Intel did like a stupid kid and dropped the ball then kicked it into their own stupid face.
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Can you elaborate on the blatant upgrade in every way claim? lol
 
xDiVolatilX said:
Can you elaborate on the blatant upgrade in every way claim? lol
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I rotated between all 3 platforms for a while, playing on each one for a week or so. I've remained on my 265K, it doesn't get as much max fps as the other two but its 1%/0.1% lows are for some reason much better in most games. I like the stability more as I'm really sensitive to frame pacing issues (AMDip I'm looking at you).
 
spine said:
I went from very well tuned 14900K to 9800X3D and it was a blatant upgrade in every way.
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I've done the same but the only noticeable upgrade for me is the vastly lower power consumption. I haven't really noticed the gaming performance improvement but maybe that's because I often encounter GPU bottlenecks rather than CPU bottlenecks since I tend to max out graphics settings with my 5090 and 4K monitor.

The tradeoff is that I do sometimes wish I still had the multi-threaded performance of the 14900K which makes for faster shader compilation as well as for heavily multi-threaded tasks, but I seldom do that kind of stuff anyway so I couldn't justify the cost of going with the 9900X3D or the 9950X3D.
 
With a 5090 you'll be CPU bound is many titles at 4k actually, making the 9800X3D a clear winner, even with a 4090 that is the case (this is why the difference between the two cards is small in many benchmarks, as even the 9800X3D can't always keep up). You have be to the "native" only kind of person (or VR user) to really manage to be actually GPU bound in the days of DLSS.

And still, that really depends on the titles you play, something like Dragon Dogma 2 or BG3 or Jedi Survivor is CPU bound at native 4k even with a 4090, and AMD's lead can be massive especially in some scenes. BF6 too, is CPU heavy, to quote a recent and popular example.

Native is extremely wasteful with how far DLSS has come anyway, I'll personally take the higher framerates and lower power consumption any day, even if DLAA can look better with pixel peeping.

There is really no reason to look at Intel anymore, except for financial reasons, when applicable (which is not very common and you said didn't apply to you). We even know that AL is a dead platform already, while AMD will offer at least one more round of ridiculously good X3D chips on the current socket.

So, get a 9950X3D.

edit : and I forgot to mention that almost every game is a mess of shader and traversal stutters nowadays... so the faster CPU will subjectively feel smoother even if you manage to stay GPU bound a lot
 
kalston said:
With a 5090 you'll be CPU bound is many titles at 4k actually, making the 9800X3D a clear winner, even with a 4090 that is the case (this is why the difference between the two cards is small in many benchmarks, as even the 9800X3D can't always keep up). You have be to the "native" only kind of person (or VR user) to really manage to be actually GPU bound in the days of DLSS.

And still, that really depends on the titles you play, something like Dragon Dogma 2 or BG3 or Jedi Survivor is CPU bound at native 4k even with a 4090, and AMD's lead can be massive especially in some scenes. BF6 too, is CPU heavy, to quote a recent and popular example.

Native is extremely wasteful with how far DLSS has come anyway, I'll personally take the higher framerates and lower power consumption any day, even if DLAA can look better with pixel peeping.

There is really no reason to look at Intel anymore, except for financial reasons, when applicable (which is not very common and you said didn't apply to you). We even know that AL is a dead platform already, while AMD will offer at least one more round of ridiculously good X3D chips on the current socket.

So, get a 9950X3D.

edit : and I forgot to mention that almost every game is a mess of shader and traversal stutters nowadays... so the faster CPU will subjectively feel smoother even if you manage to stay GPU bound a lot
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DLSS looks like ass even in its 4th iteration. I’ll take my graphics sharp and without ghosting, thanks.
 
kalston said:
With a 5090 you'll be CPU bound is many titles at 4k actually, ...
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Or not. With a 5090 I'd expect you to be monitor limited in many games, CPU limited in a few, and GPU limited in more - yes, even with a 5090.

What seems to be often left out of the discussion is the monitor refresh rate. With gonzo CPU X and GPU Y, sure, you can push multiple 100's of fps, but if the monitor refresh rate is (say) 120 Hz, all those frames happening faster are just left on the floor.
 
Yeah. My monitor is 240Hz which gives a lot of headroom for high fps. Even with DLSS, a lot of the games I play are graphically demanding enough to push GPU utilization closer to 100%
 
Jedi Survivor isn't CPU dependent anymore even with a 5090, not in 4k native anyway. Since I can get 100+ fps anyway, I wouldn't use upscaling and my monitor is 120hz.

I think it was more CPU dependent at launch, but back then AMD only had the 7800x3D which never seemed to be faster than my Intel system when comparing OC/tuned systems at least.

Vast majority of single player games I've played are 100% GPU limited in 4k even when using DLSS Quality. Only one I have that has CPU dependency in 4k native is Hogwarts and really only in a few areas.

Online fps games are really where x3D pays off IMO.

14900ks below.

9_27_2025 9_37_48 AM.jpg
 
LigTasm said:
DLSS looks like ass even in its 4th iteration. I’ll take my graphics sharp and without ghosting, thanks.
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I would object with that native with TAA looks worse as vaseline are all over the screen and native with no AA is a jaggies/crawlies horror show so I question your visual cortex as it seems defective.
 
littlegreenmenfromhome said:
I would object with that native with TAA looks worse as vaseline are all over the screen and native with no AA is a jaggies/crawlies horror show so I question your visual cortex as it seems defective.
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Oh yeah TAA looks awful, you're totally right. Too bad most games now rely on it to cover all the garbage they didn't bother fixing.
 
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