Leak: AMD’s Ryzen 9000X3D chips aren’t looking like a leap forward

Somebody goofed — and now AMD’s unannounced Ryzen 9000X3D desktop processors have been partially revealed. But like Intel’s new Arrow Lake desktop CPUs, it doesn’t look like they’ll be a huge performance improvement on their predecessors. If so, that’s a shame given how poorly received AMD’s Ryzen 9000 was, to begin with.

According to slides from an MSI presentation published by HardwareLuxx today (via VideoCardz), the new chips may have respectable multicore performance gen-over-gen, with an eight-core 9000X3D outperforming a Ryzen 7 7900X3D by up to 28 percent in Cinebench R23. But they can offer as little as 2 percent gains in Black Myth: Wukong and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, according to MSI’s preliminary testing.

And against the vanilla Ryzen 9000 series, MSI found that X3D performance was so close as to practically be the same. MSI does note that “Performance is expected to be better on PR samples and retail chips,” though.

It’s not clear whether HardwareLuxx broke an embargo or whether MSI might be responsible for the leak — strangely, it appears that section of the presentation was mostly about Intel’s new Core Ultra 200S chips, and it’s not clear why unreleased AMD chips would be part of that section. The presentation shows that MSI’s discussion of Intel chips was embargoed to October 10th.