Are AMD Ryzen CPUs suitable for gaming?

Is AMD Ryzen suitable for gaming? To answer the question accurately, it is necessary to go into detail about how AMD has competed with Intel in the CPU space and how it has won in recent years.

AMD CPUs in the pre-Ryzen era

Let's see why people thought AMD CPUs weren't suitable for gaming. There was a time when this was true. AMD's pre-Ryzen era was defined by a limited socket and the constant reuse of the same basic CPU architecture for each generation.

Before Zen/Ryzen, AMD released and created multiple versions of Bulldozer, a CPU architecture. Bulldozer's big innovation when it launched in 2011 was its superior multi-core performance. Games and most applications at the time were not particularly well optimized to use multiple CPU cores. This is made worse by the fact that Intel has the market leading CPU performance per core and has maintained this for many years.

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It shows how dangerous reworking basic CPU architecture can really be. Bulldozer has improved many times but it never caught up with Intel in terms of gaming performance, at least until 2017.

How did AMD's launch change things?

Back in 2017, Ryzen CPUs with the new Zen architecture arrived just in time. Intel, having faced no competition in years, just gets lazy about refreshing its architecture every year and raises prices pretty much on a whim.

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When Ryzen launched, it beat Intel on price versus performance. AMD has improved multi-core performance, and single-core performance is now within Intel's range - Ryzen CPUs are finally suitable for gaming. With game engines that are well optimized for multiple cores, Ryzen 5 CPUs can even completely outperform Intel Core i5 CPUs, making them the best CPUs if you're playing something like the i 3, with games Industry leading engine.

Is AMD Ryzen good for gaming these days?

There are still areas where Intel and AMD battle each other, but AMD Ryzen is perfect for today's gaming! Newer generations of AMD have further improved single-core performance and per-core pricing. At the time of writing, AMD's Ryz 7000 series CPUs and previous generation Ryzen 5000 chips deliver massive gaming performance. Both new PC builders and those looking for an upgrade have a great value proposition from AMD Ryzen CPUs.

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CPU buying guide recommends AMD Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X for gamers. Although Intel's Core i5-13600K and the latest Core i5-14600K perform better than both of these CPUs, they currently cost much more. Additionally, AMD's AM5 platform offers greater longevity and more accessible overclocking tools.

Before the launch of Intel's 13th generation lineup, Intel CPUs only maintained a lead in games that were extremely reliant on single-threaded performance, and even that had diminishing returns in low-key gaming. frequency 120Hz. A few years ago, Intel was the leader in that space, and as things stand, Intel appears to have reclaimed the gaming and productivity crown across all price points. Benchmarks aside, AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs easily achieve performance equivalent to Intel's 13th and 14th generation chips.

So, Ryzen CPUs are definitely a great choice for gaming today. In fact, the two current generation consoles, Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally, both use custom AMD Ryzen CPUs.

Best AMD CPU for gaming

Let's talk about Ryzen desktop CPUs that you can use for your PC build. The following is a list of current Ryzen CPUs based on various budgets and build requirements.

Lesley Montoya

Update 18 May 2024