AMD’s 3D V Cache on 5800X3D – Conclusion – Review

The Ryzen 7 5800X and 5800X3D behave very differently when we configure them with faster or slower memory. Especially in gaming, the 5800X3D doesn’t depend nearly as much as the 5800X on the fast RAM to perform optimally. You can view these differences in two ways: in 5800X3D there’s not much to gain with faster working memory or not much to lose with slower working memory.

King’s lair

The theoretical side of the story has interesting implications. With three times the larger L3 cache on the 5800X3D, the correct data is available on this processor more often than the 5800X. Because the normal 5800X is more likely to suffer from a Miss lair, this data must be retrieved from working memory, which causes a delay. This often happens due to workloads like gaming being difficult to predict, and here we see the big gains thanks to the 3D cache. The 5800X3D’s slower clock speeds above the 5800X are compensated in most cases by the 96MB L3 cache versus the 5800X’s already small 32MB L3 cache. The main advantage is that these performance gains come from something other than ever faster clock speeds, so that no increased power consumption is required, while efficiency below the line can increase exponentially.

We’ll undoubtedly see the 3D V cache that AMD is now using on a consumer processor for the first time on future Ryzen processors. Because the next generation of Zen CPUs will use DDR5 Which generally have a higher latency, the 3D cache has a clean job of absorbing the hardest hits. that advantage DDR5 in Intel Alder Lake The bottom line in games doesn’t necessarily mean the same for Zen 4. However, the results of this article show that for games specifically, there’s likely more to be made with a much larger L3 cache. And let AMD find a more convenient way to do it using a 3D cache rather than building a huge monolithic chip.

Practice

What does this mean for practice? Not much at the moment, because buyers of both the 5800X and 5800 X3D probably already combine a processor with fast working memory. Especially at this point in the DDR4 lifecycle, the added cost of a fast, low-latency memory pool isn’t much anymore.

Also, in practice, players will increasingly play at resolutions higher than 1080p, where the differences will be smaller than in our tests. Moreover, it comes to scenarios where the highest frame rates are achieved using one of the fastest video cards at the moment, while enough gamers are already satisfied with only 120, 90 or 60 frames per second.

In the frame times of our benchmarks, the differences are still slightly larger than the frame rates, showing that the 5800X relies more on fast working memory than the 5800X3D. If you decide to play with the RX 6900 XT at 1080p, you’ll get more frames by switching from 5800X to 5800X3D instead of combining that first CPU with faster memory.