Two of AMD's new Ryzen 7000X3D V-Cache chips are due to launch on the 28th: the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. As is tradition, someone with access to one of these chips pre-launch accidentally uploaded a Geekbench 5 benchmark result, with some interesting results. The 7950X3D showed only similar single-threaded performance as well as lower multi-threaded performance to the regular 7950X. Although this benchmark seems to reveal something we should be concerned about with Ryzen 7000X3D, it actually shows the kind of performance we'd expect.

Let's not get bogged down by how accurate the leaked benchmark might be; we already expected the 7950X3D to trail the 7950X in some cases. 3D V-Cache technology allows AMD to add an extra 64MB of cache onto its CPUs, but it's not without downsides. CPUs with V-Cache have thermal, power, and voltage limitations, which means clock speeds sometimes have to come down. This isn't too much of a problem in single-threaded workloads which use little power and don't create much heat, but it's definitely a problem in multi-thread, and the Geekbench 5 results clearly show that.

The other factor in this benchmark is the usefulness of the V-Cache itself. The thing is, having more cache doesn't always mean better performance, and Geekbench 5 just isn't a workload that benefits much from more cache. Ryzen 3D V-Cache CPUs are primarily made for higher framerates in games, which are much more memory and cache sensitive than most other applications. Depending on what you do or don't do on your PC, you might not see any benefit from V-Cache and perhaps even lower performance compared to non-X3D chips.

Back in 2022, we saw the same exact thing happen with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the very first Ryzen CPU with V-Cache. In workloads where clock speed mattered, it was slower than the regular Ryzen 7 5800X, but in games the 5800X3D was clearly the better CPU for achieving high framerates. That's probably why not everyone is confused about this Geekbench 5 result; most comments on various articles and threads point out that V-Cache reduces frequency and only improves performance in select applications, like games.

Source: Wccftech