What We Learned
So there you have it, AMD's bad benchmarks are indeed BAD, and frankly unnecessary. AMD should have just announced the 5900XT and 5800XT and left it at that. There's no need to show gaming performance for Zen 3 processors that we've had for three years now. Everyone knows what they are, and without a hefty price cut, they're not worth buying for gaming. The 5900XT might make sense for productivity, assuming it's much cheaper than the 5950X and you're already on the AM4 platform, but for gaming, surely the 5700X3D for $200 makes much more sense than the 5800XT.
As for benchmarking CPUs with low-end GPUs, we hope we're starting to make some headway here with readers who believe testing with an RTX 4090 at 1080p is misleading, inaccurate, or whatever else they come up with. The idea is to see how many frames each part can output, allowing you to compare their performance and determine which one offers the best value at a given price point.
The idea of testing with a "more realistic" GPU might make sense on the surface, but it's a deeply flawed approach that tells you nothing useful and, if anything, only serves to mislead. Pretending that the Ryzen 7 5800X is just as fast as the Core i7-13700K for gaming might make you feel good about the Ryzen processor, but outside of GPU-limited gaming, it's simply not true.
We also found that the Ryzen 7 7800X3D was no faster than the Core i3-12100 when using the Radeon RX 6600, but we're pretty sure you'll find that the Ryzen 7 processor is indeed much faster for gaming, and it won't take you long to discover this. Anyway, this is not the first time we touch on this subject, so for those yet to be convinced, we doubt we got you this time.
As for AMD, this was an embarrassing and unnecessary marketing blunder, and we're most annoyed by the fact that we now have to benchmark these CPUs when they're released. Ideally, we'd just like to ignore them and call them what they are: the 5900XT is a 5950X, and the 5800XT is a 5800X.