AMD Ryzen 5 7600 review: at what cost?

Our benchmark results are presented a little differently to what you might be used to elsewhere on the web. On mobile, you'll get a basic overview, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat experience with embedded YT videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses; you can even choose exactly what GPUs at what resolutions you're interested in and it'll update in real time. Below the real-time stuff is a bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. As always, all the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

We'll start with two games that offer a stern test for gaming CPUs: Flight Simulator 2020 and Hitman 3.

Flight Simulator 2020

Flight Sim is our first contender, as we take an autopilot flight from London City to London Heathrow over some of the city's most well-known landmarks. This game is incredibly heavy on the CPU, even at 1440p and Ultra settings, and CPUs generally fit into different tiers based on their core count and speed.

We see a three percent performance advantage for the Ryzen 5 7600X over the 7600 at 1080p with DDR5-6000 RAM, showing the non-X model hewing quite close to its higher-powered counterpart. It's a similar story with 5200MT/s RAM, but note there is a decent performance advantage with the faster RAM - around 10 percent in this title.

Hitman 3

Hitman 3's Dartmoor benchmark comes next. Of the two integrated benchmarks provided in the game's out-of-game option menu, Dartmoor offers the greater CPU load with a demonstration of the Glacier Engine's destruction physics.

Once again, we see a three to four percent advantage for the 7600X over the 7600 at 1080p, so about half of that we saw in our content creation benchmarks on page one. Again, it's a similar margin at 1440p of around four percent.

For context, our 184fps 1080p result puts us clear of the Ryzen 5600X, 5800X and 5950X (at 149, 158 and 168fps respectively), but behind the 211fps 5800X3D which remains a marvel - even with DDR4-3600 RAM. Looking at the Intel side of things, the 12600K is the faster CPU when both sides have DDR5-6000 RAM, with the 7600 only beating the likes of the 12400F.

It's early doors, but so far the 7600 looks reasonably comparable to the 7600X. Let's see how that changes when we look at the next set of games, this time three FPS titles.

AMD Ryzen 5 7600 analysis

• Introduction, test rig and content creation benchmarks
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3 [this page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Counter-Strike: GO, Metro Exodus EE, Black Ops Cold War
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Crysis 3 Remastered
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• AMD Ryzen 5 7600: the Digital Foundry verdict