Among AMD's many announcements at CES 2022, one interesting product that went relatively unnoticed was the Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU. Despite still being a Zen 3 product, which Intel's Alder Lake dethroned, AMD claimed that its new product was the fastest gaming CPU in the market, easily beating even Intel's latest offerings in terms of frame rates.
The company attributes its success to its new 3D V-Cache technology, which sees the new chip feature a whopping 96MB of L3 cache. But how does AMD's 3D V-Cache work? And how does it help the gaming experience that much? Let's find out.
How Does AMD's 3D V-Cache Work?
Before we go ahead and explain how 3D V-Cache works, we first need to clarify how L3 cache in general works.
In a CPU, we have three different levels of CPU cache—L1, L2, and L3. The main difference between each level boils down to speed and capacity: L1 is the smallest but also the fastest, while L3 is quite a bit slower, but it's also the largest. L3, being the largest, acts as the lowest level.
Think of the L3 cache as a general memory pool where the CPU can store instructions and from where the L2/L1 caches can retrieve or send stuff as needed. The bigger the memory pool (L3), the more instructions can be stored simultaneously and quickly retrieved by the CPU, and the faster it can execute those instructions.
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This is where 3D V-Cache comes in.
You might've already seen how standard Zen 3 chips pack up to 32MB of L3 cache and double-die chips like the Ryzen 9 5900X, up to 64MB. This is already pretty big, but what if it was bigger?
AMD first introduced 3D V-Cache last year and demonstrated the technology on a Ryzen 9 prototype, which packed a whopping 192MB of L3 cache. This Ryzen 7 5800X3D will be the first commercial product to launch with this technology, at a more conservative yet still very impressive 96MB of L3 cache.
The "3D" branding already kind of gives it away; it basically works by stacking multiple layers of cache on top of one another, essentially multiplying the amount of cache the CPU has access to at any given moment. This way, you can go from 32MB—the standard size on the regular Ryzen 7 5800X—to the 96MB the 5800X3D is packing.
How Does 3D V-Cache Help in Gaming?
It may help a lot—although we wouldn't say to the same degree as the picture AMD depicts.
Having more L3 cache is not something that every workload will benefit from. After all, computers do various things, and while AMD typically shines when it comes to productivity tasks, this particular chipset is touting improvements in the gaming department specifically.
The increased L3 cache helps when the CPU needs to handle multiple instructions, as instructions can be stored in the L3 cache directly in the CPU and pulled from there quickly instead of being drawn from the RAM.
Gaming is one such workload that can benefit from having a large L3 cache. In games, the CPU is handling a lot of different instructions quickly, and the more instructions that can be pulled from the CPU itself instead of the RAM, the better.
In the case of the 5800X3D, compared to the regular 5800X, the L3 cache is effectively three times larger, thanks to the 3D V-Cache technology. As a result, it can store three times as many instructions, which can be executed by the CPU more quickly and efficiently. This should translate into better performance and frame rates, especially for more CPU-bound games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
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According to AMD, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D can trade blows with Intel's Alder Lake processors despite them being much newer. And it's all thanks to 3D V-Cache. At least, that is, with AMD's official numbers. The company is claiming a 17% advantage in frame rate on Final Fantasy XIV compared to the Intel Core i9-12900K, which, if true, is impressive considering how the 12th-gen CPU already leapfrogged the standard 5800X.
Until the CPU is out, we have no way of verifying these numbers, as more scientific testing would be needed to paint a clearer picture of which product is actually better in gaming. One important point to note here is that AMD measured these numbers at 1080p in-game resolution, and as resolution scales up, the frame rate baton gets slowly passed to the GPU.
Should I Get A 3D V-Cache-Equipped CPU?
The answer, for me, would be that you should wait until the 5800X3D is on store shelves and in the hands of independent reviewers before drawing conclusions. We're not saying AMD is lying—this could ideally be the best gaming CPU on the market, at least until either Zen 4 or Raptor Lake takes that spot later this year.
Any company would clearly show favorable numbers, and it never hurts to do your own research, especially when it involves something like your gaming PC that costs a few thousand bucks.
The prospects of AMD's 3D V-Cache technology are very promising, and we'll likely know more about it once Ryzen 7000 chips, with the Zen 4 architecture, land later this year on store shelves. But is this the definite Intel killer the company's been looking for, or will Intel come up with something to clap back at AMD? Only time will tell.
AMD's 3D V-Cache Might Live Up To The Hype
AMD's claims do make sense here. More L3 cache has the potential to greatly improve gaming performance, as long as we're talking about the right games with the right workloads. CPU-intensive games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends will likely see the most improvement. But in more graphic-heavy games, the picture is muddier.
All we know for now is that the desktop CPU space is heating up again, and we're totally here for it. After all, competition results in innovation, which further leads to good things for the consumers in one way or another.
