In an unexpected result, AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600 manages to beat the Intel Core i9-9900K in XCOM: Chimera Squad by a hefty 30%. As per benchmarks conducted by ComputerBase, the Ryzen 3000 processors absolutely crush it in the latest XCOM game.
At 1080p, the Ryzen 9 3900X nets an average of 195.6 FPS and 0.1% lows of 156.6 FPS. The Ryzen 5 3600 follows shortly behind with 191.8 FPS average and 153.5 FPS lows. Intel’s fastest desktop CPU, the Core i9-9900K comes in third with an average of 153.2 FPS. AMD’s previous-gen Ryzen 5 2600X performs nearly on par with the 9900K being just 2 FPS behind with 150.7 FPS on average.
The only plausible explanation to this is that XCOM: Chimera Squad makes full use of the fat L3 cache featured on the Ryzen 3000 processors (GameCache). The large cache is supposed to cut down latency by storing more and more data on-chip, thereby significantly improving gaming performance. While most games do benefit from this and show hefty gains the preceding Ryzen 2000 chips, Chimera Squad seems to properly utilize it, resulting in Intel-killing performance.
Another takeaway from this test is how well the game utilizes multi-core CPUs. Even a quad-core CPU is sufficient if you are aiming for 1080p 120Hz or 1440p 120Hz. However, the fact that the Ryzen 5 3600 ( a six-core CPU with 12 threads) manages to beat the Core i9 (eight cores and 16 threads) means that the L3 cache plays a much more important role than the number of threads. Regardless, the game is excellently optimized for modern CPUs and even someone with a Celeron should be able to run it without any issues.
