Image: Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
Having achieved supremacy in most reviews of high-end gaming CPUs, AMD is now flexing a bit. The company recently pointed out that several of its Ryzen X3D CPUs can reach 1,000 fps in esports titles when paired with the right GPU.
Unfortunately, that GPU isn’t always made by AMD. Nevertheless, AMD China has published a slide listing six titles in which two of its CPUs — the fantastic Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D — can hit 1,000 frames per second.
The slide was published by @realVictor_M on X. An AMD representative in the United States said via email that the slide “appears to be genuine,” though it would have been authored by AMD’s regional PR team overseas and couldn’t be authenticated by press time.
The slide simply points out that three CPUs can achieve 1,000 fps when the games Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Player Unknown: Battlegrounds, Naraka: Bladepoint, and Marvel Rivals are played using the Ryzen CPUs. Not all of the CPUs listed could hit 1,000 fps on all of the games; as the slide indicates, the only games that all three chips could achieve those numbers in were League of Legends and Valorant.
It’s also possible that the slide contains an error: on the left, AMD lists the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and the mobile Ryzen 9 9955HX3D processor as part of the “1,000 Club,” as translated by Google Translate and Tom’s Hardware, which noted the slide. But its matrix of games lists the 9800X3D twice, though paired with two separate GPUs.
AMD also set some constraints: the test PCs ran at 1080p, and at 540Hz. The test PCs ran Windows 11 24H2, and turned off the Security Account Manager and Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) — though our tests with VBS showed that turning it off or on didn’t have much effect besides a few percentage points’ worth of performance on certain games. Still, even a few frames may have made the difference. We can’t know for certain.
It’s also worth noting that of the GPUs listed, only one is made by AMD. In fact, of the three GPUs listed — Nvidia’s GeForce RTX GeForce 5080 and 5090, as well as AMD’s Radeon RX 9070XT — AMD only achieved 1,000 fps consistently with the GeForce GPUs, and not its own.
(Interestingly, AMD was also the first to reach 1,000 MHz [1GHz] with its CPUs, with the launch of the AMD Athlon on March 6, 2000.)
In general gaming, theres always some tension: do gamers really need something like 300 fps and above, or should they instead dial up the resolution and/or visual effects for a prettier experience? In esports, however, it’s all about the victory, and there’s some truth to the “frames win games” slogan. In this case, AMD appears to be making a valid argument that esports aficionados should be buying a Ryzen X3D chip…but also a GeForce to go along with it.
This story was updated at 11:04 AM PT with additional detail.)
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers’ News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.
