In recent times, no hardware enthusiast has any doubt that AMD is getting a good head start on Intel in the desktop processor environment, where AMD offers higher synthetic performance and higher synthetic performance with its 3rd Gen Ryzen. lower price than the options offered by Intel. However, if you have read the reviews of these latest Zen 3 processors you will have noticed that, even being more powerful in the benchmarks, in games Intel continues to take the lead. In this article, we’re going to take a deep look at the facts and tests these processors have undergone to find out why Intel is still better than AMD in gaming .
AMD’s marketing materials show that their new generation of processors take a double-digit lead in FPS, but as we will be able to see below when these processors are mounted on a real PC, things change quite a bit.
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X vs Intel Core i9-10900K in gaming
The tests that we are going to show you below have been carried out by TechPowerUp (linked at the bottom of this article), and it must be said that they have been carried out with a simulation under the Unreal Engine 4 graphics engine with the DirectX 12 API that it seeks to maintain as much as possible both CPU and GPU without changing the scene, that is, it always puts the hardware at maximum no matter how much time passes (unlike the graphical benchmarks that we all know, which have dynamic scenes that change the load to which the computer is subjected team).
We are going to start by explaining the graphs that you can see below. On the vertical axis (Y) we have the frames per second (FPS), and obviously the higher the better (vertical sync is disabled, of course). The horizontal axis (X) shows the load factor in percentage, something that is relatively arbitrary but you have to think that the further to the left, each FPS is easier to render so higher FPS are achieved, while the further to the right, each frame is more complex and puts more load on the GPU. The idea here is to be able to play around with the CPU-GPU bottleneck to see at what point it happens and what happens when it happens.
In the graphs above you can see the results of what we have explained to you, using a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. We can see how AMD achieves a much higher FPS than Intel when we look at the left area of the graph (about a 20% improvement), and this is the advantage of the IPC of the Zen 3 microarchitecture. In this limited CPU scenario, no there is doubt that AMD is the clear winner.
As we move to the right on the graph, we see that the FPS decreases, an expected behavior because as we have indicated before, the GPU is increasingly loaded and slows things down. Interestingly, the drops are almost symmetrical on both Intel and AMD but at very different FPS speeds, and only above 40% the gap between both platforms begins to narrow.
At 80% both AMD and Intel already get almost the same FPS rates; we are starting to have more and more limitations because of the GPU. As the GPU load increases, less work is left on the CPU because there are fewer frames to perform calculations, and for gaming logic there is no reason to update states more than once per frame because only updates can be displayed once per frame, right? This reduces CPU usage, and that’s why the lines representing Intel and AMD end up coming together.
Now as the GPU load increases we gradually see a small window between 80% and 120% where the Intel Comet Lake platform outperforms AMD (it is marked with a red arrow). This is quite surprising, but the data is too clear to think that it is a random event, that is, it happens for something. One theory is that the aggressive idle logic of AMD processors shuts down some of their cores because they are no longer under full load; in theory Zen 3 does this very quickly and without interaction from the operating system (for power management) and start them up very quickly, but not instantly and this in the end shows.
Once we hit 140% on the graph, the gaming FPS rates are practically identical for Intel and AMD. Let no one be surprised, because the GPU is causing a bottleneck (on purpose), and regardless of what processor you have, if the GPU does not give for more you will not get more FPS in games because that no longer depends on the processor.
How the speed of RAM influences
The following test shows the effect of memory speed. Instead of using DDR4 3200 MHz CL14 RAM, DDR4 3800 MHz CL16 RAM was used for the test, with the Infinity Fabric running at 1: 1 (IF: DRAM). This is the best possible scenario for AMD, as a Ryzen 9 5900X cannot run Infinity Fabric at 2000 MHz.
Here we can see that the shape of the curve is almost identical to the previous scenario, but there are slight differences: the area where Intel is faster than AMD is still there, but the advantage is much less pronounced.
What if a less powerful graph is used? And a more powerful one?
In the previous tests, as we have mentioned, an RTX 2080 Ti was used, a graph that by price of course not many users can afford, so let’s see what would happen with a less powerful GPU, such as an RTX 2060 which is the top sales. of the previous generation of NVIDIA.
Again we can see that the curve is almost the same, but in this case Intel comes out even better than before. When the CPU is very limited, AMD records huge gains over Intel in gaming; the “hump” in favor of Intel is still there but in this case, instead of being between 80% and 120%, it comes much earlier, between 50% and 90%. This is because the RTX 2060 offers much lower base performance than the RTX 2080 Ti, which means that the workload is tied to the GPU much earlier. It is also worth mentioning that the space where Intel comes out ahead is much larger.
Now let’s see what happens if we use an RTX 3090, NVIDIA’s top-of-the-range graphics card today.
Intel’s performance advantage is completely gone, and AMD comes out ahead on the entire graphics. Also, here the gaming FPS of AMD and Intel do not meet up to 125%.
AMD is (much) better than Intel but only in ideal scenarios
After many tests, we can see that AMD has surpassed Intel in gaming performance, but only in the best cases: using faster memory and with a very powerful graphics card. Of course this is a reasonable requirement, but the reality is that the largest market niche is in the mid-range (especially if we take into account the price of high-end graphics cards), and this means that the majority of users they will find themselves in the position that Intel gives them better performance than AMD in games.
Mind you, AMD’s AM4 platform makes upgrades much easier due to its extensive backward compatibility. This makes it likely that gamers will upgrade their processor independently of the rest of the hardware, possibly just upgrading their CPU but keeping motherboard, memory, and graphics. In these cases the gains will continue to be substantial, but only if games are run that do not lead the GPU to have to work 100% because then they would be in the position that an Intel processor would give them a better result.
