Ryzen 5900X Streaming – 5900X vs 3900X vs 3600X
One of the key selling points of Ryzen CPUs over the years has been their ability to let you stream and game all from one PC, and with great quality too. I’ve tested that on a load of different chips, and since I’ve got a 5900X on hand for the moment, I thought I’d run it through its paces too, and see how it compares to the last generation 3900X, and threw in a 3600X for comparison to a more budget friendly option. So, how does it fair? Lets find out. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
So, lets quickly run through the test setup. I’m using the same RTX 2080ti, X570 Master and 32GB of 3000MHz RAM for all the chips – the only thing that changes on the hardware side is the CPU. As for software, I’m using OBS to capture the games, and both streaming to twitch using the x264 encoder set to the fast preset, and at 6000Kbps, AND recording to disk using a second instance of the x264 encoder with the “indistinguishable” preset in OBS. I’m testing Watchdogs Legion, COD Modern Warfare and Fortnite here, and at 1080p and very high/ultra settings, but with any ray tracing stuff turned off.
So, how did they get on? Lets start with Watchdogs Legion. This is a game that even 2080ti’s at 1080p struggle to play overly well. At stock, all our chips ran at under 120FPS, with the largest gap being at 6 core 3600X at 104, vs the 3900X at 110, and the newer 5900X at 114. All pretty close, with a slight advantage to the 5900X as you’d expect. When you start streaming though, the difference in core counts becomes a lot more obvious. The 3600X went from over 100FPS average, to 77, which while still plenty playable, is 26% of it’s initial performance lost. That’s a fair chunk. Compare that to the 12 core 3900X, and it only lost 15%. That’s a sizeable difference too, but not nearly as much, and the 5900X absolutely smashed it, only losing 6% of it’s initial performance, and actually still beat the 3600X’s non-streaming result too. Impressive.
COD Modern Warfare was a lot less conclusive. They barely made a dent when streaming and recording – and even without that they were all well within margin of error of each other, so I’ll leave this one up for you, but move onto Fortnite.
In stock numbers, ie when not streaming, all three CPUs were pretty close. The 3600X was a couple of frames behind, but otherwise similar. But again, when you start streaming, it’s a completely different story. The 5900X again was barely phased. It lost just 4% of it’s non-streaming performance, which is incredible. The 3900X lost a little at almost 10%, but the 3600X, that lost almost 20%. While it’s still playing at 166FPS and that’s more than enough, losing that much performance – at least that percentage – shows the extra power of the 12 core chips, over the 6 in the 3600X.
When it comes to stream and recording quality, the 5900X and 3900X are as close as it gets. The stream is the more difficult to compress so lets look at those clips. In COD there isn’t much difference between the two 12 cores, the framerate is fine and the quality looks good for 6000Kbps. But when you see the 3600X’s stream, you can see it falls behind. The stream has a dropped frame every couple of seconds, a little bit of hitching, which leads to an.. Unpleasant viewing experience. The same goes for the recordings from the 3600X, it hitches just a little, enough to be annoying when watching.
In Fortnite the clips look pretty similar, although surprisingly the 3600X seemed to be ever so slightly sharper in the still frames I looked at, but really nothing in it. The 3600X also managed to stay smooth in both the stream and the recording which is great news.
In Watchdogs, again the two 12 core chips were near identical, with only the 3600X suffering some frame drops and stuttering. The quality remains the same across all three though, at least as far as I can see.
I should make it clear that the stuttering you see on the 3600X is most likely thanks to me recording and streaming at the same time. If you were just recording, or just streaming, or even using the “same as stream” setting, you’d have a better time with it. This is meant to be a stress test, and clearly it works.
So, can the 5900X stream? Definitely. In performance alone it was able to lose next to no performance compared to playing without streaming, which is something even the 3900X can’t say it can do. That, coupled with it’s extra creativity, and non-streaming game performance, makes it a pretty compelling chip – if it weren’t for the price…
