The 3D is awesome in most games and not so much in productivity.
The clocks are limited to 4.5 GHz and sometimes it feels more like a little brother of the 5800G.
When a game doesn't take advantage of the big L3 cache, it's a problem.
There are also a lot of complaints about stuttering and latency issues, despite the better lows in benchmarking.
But in general almost everyone is really happy about the gaming performances, low power consumption and temperatures.

The 5900X is obviously much better in productivity and not bad in gaming.
But it's very often not a good bin so in gaming the 5800x and 5950x, which have 8 good cores, are winning by a little margin.
The real problem is that the good cores, going over 5 GHz, are only six.
The other six are most of the times terribly slow.

The 5800x in gaming will almost always trash the 5900x in every metric of the framerate.
Almost: Not if the game doesn't takes advantage of the L3.
In that case will run like a 5800x without PBO.

If you consider a 4090, I guess enabling PBO can yield about 10-20% improvement in average.
But the 3D cache gives a lot more, spanning from 20 to 50%.
The 4K performances will be mostly the same but at 1440p the difference can be huge.

 

The clocks are limited to 4.5 GHz and sometimes it feels more like a little brother of the 5800G.

I learned the hard way to pay attention to this portion, The G series are also all based on Cezanne and ONLY support PCIe3 for the 5xxx series Zen3 they are NOT 1:1 to the non G counter part being the x that does support PCIe4

I just went through an upgrade from the 5600G to 5700x for this very reason at first wasn't needed but now I am needing that bandwidth especially running NVMe.

 

OP, what is your current rig?

If you want the best for games then you know the answer, get the 5800x3d.
I run a 5900x and while I game I ain't no professional gamer, the 5900x is all I need for the games I play. The price of a 5900X is only $350 CAD today (Black Friday). If I was looking for a CPU this morning I buy the 5900X again.

But if I was you and wanted the best for games I would buy the 5800X3D and never look back.

 

Thanks for the replies! Very helpful!

@ManniX-ITA I'm struggling to find benchmarks that show the 5800x and 5950x beating the 5900x in gaming (in avg fps, 1% and 0.1% lows). In a video released by Gamers Nexus a few days ago (link), the benchmarks show the following:
1) The 5900x mostly beats the 5800x and the 5950x
2) The 5900x is slower than the 5800x3d in 0.1% lows and 1% lows by around 14% and 20% respectively at 1080p (except for F1 which has crazy 40% differences)

@ManniX-ITA good observation that the 5900x will have lower quality cores. I guess that practically means that applying PBO+OC to a 5900x may not yield a 10% improvement to close the "experience gap" between the 5900x and 5800x3d.

@crastakippers my current rig is a 3600, Asus TUF X570 Plus, 64GB DDR4 3200, and a 7900XTX.

I can get a new 5900x for 260 euros, vs a new 5800x3D for 320 euros, so the 5900x is 60 euros cheaper.

I am also not a professional gamer, and play games such as Cyberpunk, Doom, Assasins Creed etc.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is whether one can tune a 5900x so that, when blind tested with a 5800x3D, one wouldnt be able to tell which processor was being used.

 

@ManniX-ITA I'm struggling to find benchmarks that show the 5800x and 5950x beating the 5900x in gaming (in avg fps, 1% and 0.1% lows). In a video released by Gamers Nexus a few days ago (link), the benchmarks show the following:
1) The 5900x mostly beats the 5800x and the 5950x
2) The 5900x is slower than the 5800x3d in 0.1% lows and 1% lows by around 14% and 20% respectively (although at 1080p, and except for F1 which has crazy 40% differences)

The issue is that all these reviews with benchmarks are levelling the field using more or less "stock" settings for all CPUs.
On AMD this means that most of the times there's just PBO enabled in Auto with no CO; sometimes max boost clock to 200 MHz which sometimes make things even worse.
Sometimes PBO is not enabled at all.

The 5900x, having the lesser chance to get better with tuning due to the lower bin, has an advantage.
Also the 5800x3D is having an advantage as enabling PBO, if available, doesn't bring much more.

The 5800x if properly tuned with CO and +200 boost usually beats the 5900x by a thin margin.
This only for games which are not taking advantage of more than 8 cores, still the majority excluding AAA titles.
The 5950x if properly tuned with PBO limits, CO and the correct boost clock beats almost always the 5900x by a small to decent margin.

With the same PBO limits the 5950x will struggle to keep the first 8 cores running at high clock, it has to fulfil in the same package 4 more cores.
The 5800X will lose the advantage of the faster (if it's a decent bin, not always) 8 cores; the 5900x will be able to keep its first CCD 6 cores clocked higher.
Not that the 5800x is way less efficient than the 5900x; mine heats up more or less like the 5950x with fully tuned PBO and CO. Half the cores!

I don't think neither a 5900x or a 5950x will ever be able to close the gap with the 5800x3D in gaming, even if a good bin and perfectly tuned.
Even if you can improve the CPU performances by 20%, there's not a direct and proportional improvement in the games fps.

In almost all the games the 1% and below lows, when very far from the average, are more the result of bad development/optimization from the game developer or hitting a game engine limitation.
That's where the big L3 cache really helps sometimes because it acts as a sort of workaround.
While an higher number and average clock of the cores can help, it doesn't really change much.
Most of the times it'll not able to fill the gap with the L3 workaround.
While in those cases where the L3 doesn't help the 5800x3D will be highly penalized due to the low clocks.

 

At 4k gaming? It doesn't matter. Go for more cores if you have productivity workloads that can benefit.

 

At 4k gaming? It doesn't matter.

Depends what GPU you are using; with the 4090 even a 14900K or 7950x3D can bottleneck.
Also the OP is not playing only at 4K but at at 1440p too.

I have a 3090 and a 5950x playing at 1440p.
On almost all the new titles I do have to enable DLSS to keep at least 60 fps or so.
That means that I actually play at 1080p most of the times.
So it's very likely he's going to play as well mostly at 1080p/1440p.

I suggest you check out this video from i2HARD, they do proper benchmarking with stock & optimized settings compared and 0.1% and 1% lows.
In this video the 3D is compared against 5800x and 5900x, albeit only at 1080p.
Subtitles with automatic translation are recommended if you don't speak the language.

 

@ManniX-ITA that's a really helpful video. Thanks

I wonder however if they actually tuned the 5900x to get the most out of it. If you look at minute 18 in the video, with the HWinfo tables of the processors clocks, the 5900x seems to have all cores clocked at 4.5ghz. I thought that to get the most performance out of the 5900x, one should apply a PBO+CO and optimize each core? That way the best cores may be able to boost to close to 5Ghz (or a bit more), while the worse cores can work in 4.5Ghz range.

Am I right @ManniX-ITA, that they may not have tuned the 5900x properly?

 

onder however if they actually tuned the 5900x to get the most out of it. If you look at minute 18 in the video, with the HWinfo tables of the processors clocks, the 5900x seems to have all cores clocked at 4.5ghz. I thought that to get the most performance out of the 5900x, one should apply a PBO+CO and optimize each core? That way the best cores may be able to boost to close to 5Ghz (or a bit more), while the worse cores can work in 4.5Ghz range.

For sure they didn't get the most out of the 5800x and 5900x.
But it's already something
Something better could have been done but it wouldn't change dramatically the scores.
On the CO especially they probably didn't test thoroughly each core but set the lowest all-core count.

The clocks are really good for the 5900x, it's running the AIDA64 stress test all-core.

If you look at the AIDA64 benchmark you can see the boost clock, it's 5025 MHz for the 5900x:

 

My 5800X3D sometimes cant even keep up with my 7900XT (performs like a 7900XTX) at 1440p.
Higly advise the 5800X3D but to properly drive these GPU's in all situations you probably need a 7700X/7800X3D/13700K/14700K.

 

I prefer my 5900X over my 58X3D. I play at 4K60. My 5900X is nowhere near stock settings. What I do like about 58X3D is that it is super easy to cool, and you dont need much.

 

I decided to go for the 5900X, for the following reasons:
1) The extra cores will help me with productivity related-tasks (running VMs, video encoding)
2) I game at 1440p, and have the hope of getting a 5900X that will overclock high enough to get an extra 15-20% performance from stock
3) The price difference was big - if the price difference was less, I would have gone for the 5800X3D.

I want to thank members of this thread, in particular @ManniX-ITA , for the extremely helpful and detailed advice that was provided. You guys rock!

The 5900X should be coming in the next 5 days... have to now brush up on some overclocking guides. If anyone has any recommendations on a good guide, please let me know.

When the 5900X arrives, I will post benchmark results for some games on stock vs tuned 5900X, especially the 0.1% and 1% lows and at 1440p. It may become of interest to other members who were in the same boat as me.