According to a leaked MSI presentation spotted by Tom’s Hardware, AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9000X3D series will offer rather muted performance gains over the previous Ryzen 7000X3D and non-3D Ryzen 9000 models.

Based on the slides, the Ryzen 9000X3D series outperforms the Ryzen 7000X3D by 11 per cent (the 8-core Ryzen 7 9800X3D) to 13 per cent (the 16-core model Ryzen 9 9950X3D) in gaming, as demonstrated in titles like Far Cry 6, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Black Myth: Wukong.

The new CPUs were run at the same frequency as the previous generation processors, which is hard to achieve for the 3D V-Cache-enabled variants as they are formally not overclockable.

The results are depressing, particularly as, according to MSI's benchmarks, the new Ryzen 9000X3D with 64MB of additional 3D V-Cache can barely beat typical Ryzen 9000-series CPUs at the same 5.20 GHz fixed frequency.

AMD's typical Ryzen 9000-series processors tend to run at higher speeds. That said, while we can expect AMD's new X3D processors to offer a high single-thread performance in general due to a better memory subsystem, we have questions about their performance advantage over typical Ryzen 9000-series CPUs.

We should keep in mind that we are dealing with unofficial numbers from a third party, although rumours are that MSI is trying to pull the story, which means that someone ignored an embargo or missed an AMD memo telling them not to mention it yet.