Even though AMD just launched its regular Zen 5 CPUs in August, their lukewarm reception and the imminent arrival of competing chips from Intel could spur AMD to release the X3D V-Cache versions ahead of schedule.

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.

An MSI presentation says that AMD's Ryzen 9000X3D does not have substantially higher performance than the typical version.

Leaked benchmarks While punters had been hoping that Ryzen 9000X3D-series might save the brand, it appears that is not going to happen. According to a leaked MSI presentation spotted by Tom’s Hardware,

AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 9000X3D processors deliver a significant improvement in gaming performance compared to the existing Ryzen 7000X3D series. In benchmarks conducted using titles such as Far Cry 6, Shadow of the Tomb Raider,

The biggest problem with these benchmarks might be that the difference between the Ryzen 9000X3D and the non-3D parts seems fairly subtle so far. MSI’s leaked tests show the CPUs very close together, and this includes both the eight-core and 16-core parts.