AMD has shared some slides about its upcoming Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor, showing the performance impact of different memory speeds. According to these slides, swapping DDR5-6000 for DDR5-4800 memory is barely noticeable, causing less than 1% fps reduction on average.
Seeing the increasing memory prices caused by AI datacentre buildup, AMD released a dedicated slide demonstrating how its Ryzen 7 9850X3D maintains good gaming performance even when paired with cheaper DDR5 kits. The company compared a sweet spot DDR5-6000 kit to a cheaper DDR-4800 kit and found that gamers only lose about 1% fps by opting for the affordable solution.
Specifically, AMD measured a 1.2% advantage for the DDR5-6000 kit in Cyberpunk 2077, 1.2% in Far Cry 6, 0.2% in Red Dead Redemption 2, 0.8% in Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, and 1.6% in Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2; all of which would be unnoticeable without an fps overlay.
AMD also compared the pricing of these configurations and found that you would pay about $470 for a 32GB DDR5-6000 kit, which is 17.5% higher than a DDR5-4800 kit. Needless to say, this is a big ask from an upgrade that only boosts fps by about 1%. Instead, games could funnel these savings into a faster GPU, which would net higher gains, and is likely what AMD wants you to do.
It is important to note that this strength isn’t exclusive to the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, as any X3D chip, including Ryzen 7000 series, should behave similarly. This is possible thanks to the large L3 cache capacity offered by the 3D V-Cache layer, which adds an extra 64MB of cache on top of the CPU’s built-in 4MB per core. While 96MB of L3 cache may sound small compared to system RAM, it’s enough to hold the most-accessed data required by games closer to the cores. This eliminates a large portion of memory access, reducing the impact of slow RAM.
That said, keep in mind that the figures shared by AMD are specific to games which are known to like large caches. In other words, memory-hungry software and apps that can’t leverage large caches will likely see a large performance deficit when using the slower DDR5-4800 kits. Not a big issue for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, of course, since it’s targeted towards gamers.
The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is set to become the new gaming king, offering the same 8 Zen 5 cores as the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but clocked up to 400MHz higher. The CPU will be available January 29 at $499, offering a drop-in upgrade on AM5 boards. Watch this space.
