No CPU is faster than Ryzen 9850X3D says AMD as it shares Windows 11 performance benchmarks

At CES 2026 today, AMD made a couple of major mobile processor announcements as it revealed its new 400 series lineup as well as a couple of new additional powerful Max+ APUs. While the latter was mostly productivity-focused with a lot of emphasis on AI performance, the company also unveiled a new Ryzen desktop processor, which the company claims is now "the world's fastest gaming processor."

X3D AMD CPUs are already well known to be very fast thanks to that enormous stack of L3 Cache. If the OS is aware of how to put that to good use, all the extra vertically stacked cache can lead to big performance boosts.

Compared to the 9800X3D, the new 9850X3D gets a higher boost clock as it can reach 5.6 GHz compared to 5.2 on the 9800X3D. The base clock was not revealed to the press in our briefing but according to the company, users can expect up to 27% better gaming performance on average versus an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which has remained Team Blue's flagship mainstream desktop processor till 25.

Rest of the core specifications of the 9850X3D remain similar to the 9800X3D which means it is refresh rather than a major upgrade. Still AMD is probably going to enjoy great success with the 9850X3D too just like it has been with the 9800X3D, 9950X3D, and most other 3D V-cache processors.

As you can see in the benchmark chart above, the new AMD Ryzen 9850X3D enjoys some really hefty performance leads over the 285K in CPU-heavy games like Baldur's Gate 3, Counter-Strike 2, Hogwarts' Legacy, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, among others. Testing was done on Windows 11 24H2.

AMD also shared some productivity benchmarks and has even admitted to losing heavily to the Ultra 285K in V-Ray which is a CPU rendering and visualization app. However, in the other tests, it competes well with the Intel chip.

The 9850X3D will be available this quarter.

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Posted Wednesday 7 January 2026 at 6:35 am AEST (my time).

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