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The new AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is launching today, after a fanfare of review notes that accompanied the full reveal yesterday, and with that, the best gaming processor is now out in the wild and available to anyone looking to build the rig ultimate game. And the final nail in the coffin of Intel’s newest generation of Arrow Lake processors was hammered in, taking the only thing it had left, which was gaming efficiency, and stealing it with ease.

Intel must be looking at the CPU market with an ashen face right now, because when it comes to helping a GPU project images onto a screen at spectacular speed, its once seemingly unassailable lead in gaming performance has now completely evaporated. The latest Intel processors almost entirely manufactured by TSMC, codenamed Arrow Lakerecently arrived, are entirely dedicated to efficient and low-consumption operation.

Unfortunately, this came at the expense of almost everything. Of course, in some heavily multithreaded applications, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and his Impressive efficient cores do serious work and provide excellent benchmark numbers, but when it comes to gaming, the chips often lag well behind previous generations of processors.

But they were extremely effective and impressive, and therefore very cool.

This was some consolation for the Intel faithful (the few that remain), especially after consistent generations of processors that relied almost exclusively on higher clock speeds and ever-higher power consumption to achieve their performance.

But here’s AMD saying “Hold my pint” as it rolls out the Ryzen 7 9800X3D with the highest gaming frame rates of any CPU tested this generation, lowest gaming power consumption and lowest operating temperatures.

For our latest CPU benchmarking suite, we used Baldur’s Gate 3 as our gaming temperature and efficiency benchmark; it scales very well to different processors and can really highlight the high and low points of a given chip. In this test, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivers nearly 50% higher gaming frame rates, as well as lower temperatures and power consumption.

It was the last thing Intel had to offer gamers, a potential mini-beast of a small form factor processor. But even that is now gone thanks to the new 3D V-Cache chip. Where does Intel go from here? Back to the CPU schematics board I guess.

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