Ryzen 7 9800X3D vs Core Ultra 7 265K: 1080p Ray Tracing Tested

Two CPUs, One Demanding Test

Ray tracing at 1080p puts pressure on both the CPU and GPU in ways that standard rasterization does not. When the resolution is low enough that the GPU finishes its work faster, the processor becomes the bottleneck – and that is exactly where the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Intel Core Ultra 7 265K are being asked to prove themselves.

What Makes 1080p Ray Tracing a CPU-Heavy Scenario

At 1080p, the GPU is rendering far fewer pixels per frame than at 1440p or 4K. That sounds like it should make everything easier, but in ray tracing workloads, it actually shifts more of the bottleneck toward the CPU. Ray tracing requires the system to manage complex scene data – bounding volume hierarchies, denoising passes, and draw calls – and the CPU plays a larger role in feeding that data efficiently. When frame rates climb high enough, the GPU is waiting on the processor, not the other way around.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D carries AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology, stacking 64MB of additional L3 cache on top of the chiplet. That cache advantage is well documented in standard rasterization gaming, where it dramatically reduces the time spent fetching game data from slower system memory. In ray tracing workloads, however, the benefit is less straightforward. Ray tracing shaders access memory in less predictable patterns than traditional rendering pipelines, which can reduce the practical advantage of a large L3 cache depending on how a given game engine implements its ray tracing features.

The Core Ultra 7 265K takes a different approach entirely. Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture drops Hyper-Threading, which was a controversial move, but compensates with a redesigned front-end and improved IPC figures. In single-threaded and lightly threaded scenarios – which many game engines still produce – Arrow Lake can compete aggressively. Its P-core performance in short bursts is strong, and its memory subsystem handles irregular access patterns without the same cache dependency the 9800X3D relies on.

Both processors were tested with a high-end discrete GPU to prevent the graphics card from becoming the bottleneck. DDR5 memory was used on both platforms at standardized speeds to keep the comparison as fair as possible. For anyone curious how these chips behave under a different type of demanding workload, our Ryzen 7 9800X3D vs Core Ultra 7 265K video encoding comparison covers the production side of both CPUs in detail.

Game-by-Game Performance Across Ray Tracing Titles

In Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing: Overdrive mode enabled, the 9800X3D held a consistent lead at 1080p. The game’s Overdrive mode routes almost the entire visual pipeline through ray tracing, and the workload hits CPU resources harder than nearly any other title available right now. The 9800X3D’s cache architecture proved useful here – the engine’s traversal patterns apparently benefit from keeping more scene data on-chip. Average frame rates and especially 1% lows favored the AMD chip by a margin that would be noticeable during gameplay.

Alan Wake 2 told a similar but less dramatic story. Remedy’s engine makes heavy use of hardware ray tracing for reflections and global illumination, and both processors handled the workload with more parity. The 9800X3D still led on average frame rate, but the gap narrowed considerably at 1080p compared to what you would typically see in rasterization tests. The 265K’s 1% lows were slightly worse, pointing to occasional stalls in how the engine feeds draw call data to the GPU.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PC with ray tracing enabled at maximum settings showed the closest competition between the two chips. Insomniac’s engine runs efficiently on both AMD and Intel platforms, and the ray tracing implementation is less aggressive than Overdrive or Alan Wake 2. Frame rates were high enough on both CPUs that most of the limitation shifted back to the GPU, compressing the gap between the two processors to near-negligible levels.

Control with DX12 and all ray tracing features enabled is an older game, but still a relevant one because its ray tracing demands are well understood and consistently reproduced. Here the 265K performed slightly better than expected. Arrow Lake’s memory access behavior paired well with the way Remedy’s older engine dispatches ray tracing workloads, and the performance gap between the two CPUs was genuinely close – within testing margin in some runs.

Across all four titles, a pattern held: games with more aggressive or complex ray tracing implementations tended to favor the 9800X3D, while games with lighter or older ray tracing approaches saw the 265K close the gap significantly. Neither processor was a clear winner in every scenario, which is a more honest result than most spec sheets suggest you would find.

Power, Heat, and the Cost of Performance

Power consumption tells a meaningful part of this story. The Core Ultra 7 265K draws considerably more power under sustained gaming loads than the 9800X3D, especially when ray tracing workloads keep all cores active for extended periods. That matters for system builders thinking about cooling requirements and long-term electricity costs. The 9800X3D runs cooler and quieter under comparable workloads, which makes it the easier chip to drop into a compact or noise-sensitive build without worrying about thermal limits affecting sustained performance.

Pricing sits close enough between the two that neither has a decisive financial argument. The platform costs shift the calculus more than the CPU prices alone – AM5 boards vary widely in cost, and Intel’s LGA1851 ecosystem has its own range of motherboard options at different price points. Where the decision gets sharper is in future upgrade paths. AM5 has a stated longevity commitment from AMD, while Intel’s socket situation is less predictable after the issues that surrounded previous platform transitions. For pure ray tracing performance at 1080p, the 9800X3D wins more matchups than it loses – but the margin in several titles is small enough that the 265K remains a serious option for anyone already invested in the Intel platform.