Intel Core i9 9900K vs. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Linux Gaming Performance

First up was Total War: Three Kingdoms, the newest Linux game port from Feral Interactive and rendered on Linux using Vulkan. The RX 5700 XT came out slower than the RTX 2080 on both processors, but with that Radeon GPU the Core i9 9900K and Ryzen 9 3900X led to similar performance. On the higher-end NVIDIA cards, the Core i9 9900K led to considerably higher frame-rates for this particular game over the AMD Zen 2 alternative.

Similar to our findings in non-gaming workloads, the Ryzen 9 3900X system does consume significantly more power than the Core i9 9900K. On my TODO list still is to investigate this further to see if it's a missed optimization / power management feature on the Linux front since under Windows the numbers are reportedly tighter.

When pushing Total War: Three Kingdoms harder with the three graphics cards by running at 1440p with ultra quality settings, the Ryzen 9 3900X was more competitive and performing roughly the same as the 9900K except with the RTX 2070.

But still upwards of 50 Watt higher overall AC power consumption on the AMD setup.

With Total War: Warhammer 2 as another Feral game port to Linux, the performance was comparable between the 3900X and 9900K for the RX 5700 XT and RTX 2080 while the RTX 2070 was doing slightly better with the Intel CPU.