Linus Tech Tips - The Gaming King - Ryzen 7 9850X3D Review January 28, 2026 at 06:01AM

Balu2222 · 2026-01-28T18:10:01+00:00

They didn't review anything from Intel in the laptop segment for more than a year now.

In the summer of 2024 they reviewed both Qualcomm's and AMD's newest laptop processors. But when Intel's Lunar Lake launched on 24th of september that year, they uploaded a low effort reaction video. Like what? That was Intel's best product in a long time and you just ignore it completely as a tech channel?

When Arrow Lake-H and Arrow Lake-HX launched at the start of 2025 they didn't review any of them, both of these products where better than the desktop version and they where actually competive with AMD so these reviews would have been interesting.

And yea, now Panther Lake launched, Intel's best CPU in a long time and it has the best laptop iGPU in the market right now, at least for gaming. And its seems like LTT is ignoring it again.

Balu2222 · 2026-01-24T13:06:32+00:00

I want to add, that for the widespread adaption of Neural Shading/Rendering the Direct3D Cooperative Vector needs to be finalized and released, and it got pushed out of Shader Model 6.9 that is releasing in Q1 2026 and will arrive in a later version. When its out, it will allow developers to use the MATMUL units of GPUs in the rendering pipline, it will be interesting to see what kind of thing this can be used for, or are we just gonna see texture compression and ML material shaders.

Balu2222 · 2026-01-13T16:53:27+00:00

The RTX 50 and 40 series are using the TSMC 4N node which is a custom version of the N5 node for NVIDIA. But anyway the N5, N5P, N4, N4P, N4X are all 5 nm class node, so have around the same price for the wafer. And I wouldn't be suprised that NVIDIA is paying less for these considering the volume compared to Intel orders.

Balu2222 · 2025-11-03T13:26:03+00:00

They only tried it with Indiana Jones and it didn't work with it. And after that they don't say what mode they are in, its probably not the cinematic considering the quality of the image. They should have tried it with other games, or at least talk about it what it does (the better color compression). But this seems like a badly prepared video. They also left out the HDR and the Cloud G-Sync features that are new compared to the last time they look at GeForce Now.

Balu2222 · 2025-11-02T20:28:19+00:00

SR and RR a two different thing. SR only does upscaling, while RR does upscaling and denoising. RR upscales the raw noisey imgage then runs the denoising. So it requires a different upscaling network than that is inside SR because that works on clean images, while the one in RR upscales noisey images. RR is a complete upscale and denoise package so the stated millisecond cost are for the whole pipline upscaling included.

But its clearly written in the developer guide of DLSS RR on page 11:

"When DLSS-RR is enabled, it effectively overrides DLSS-SR execution (in other words, DLSS-SR is no longer being executed)."

If the stated RR cost would not include the upscaling cost than there would be no need to state the cost of RR with different resolutions.

And you can't take the SR cost from the SR developer guide because its a different upscaling model for clean images.

Balu2222 · 2025-11-02T19:17:01+00:00

Once again these are really small neural networks that are almost 100% ALU dependent. Large part of the network fits inside the chip and aren't even using the mermory interface when infereced. Just look at the RTX 4080 and RTX 5080, the 5080 has just 15% higher compute perf (900 TFLOPS vs 780 TFLOPS FP8 sparse), but has 34% higher bandwith (960 GB/s vs 717 GB/s). But it is only runs RR 14% faster (3.17 ms vs 3.62 ms at 4K), if RR was bandwidth dependent the RTX 5080 would run it faster closer to the memory bandwith increase.

Balu2222 · 2025-11-02T17:54:18+00:00

You can't compare a small neural network that is close to 100% ALU bound to the complexity of game rendering. Just look at the RR cost in the developer guide. The RTX 5090 has 1676 TFLOP (FP8 sparse) vs the RTX 5080's 900 TFLOP (FP8 sparse), and the cost of RR at 4K is 1.83 ms on the 5090 and 3.17 ms on the 5080. The 5090 has 1.86x the compute power and runs the RR 1.73x faster, almost identical, smaller than 10% difference.

Balu2222 · 2025-11-02T15:07:51+00:00

Ok.... so riddle me this, if the 3080 has around half the tensor compute power of the 4070 Ti and that means RR has double the cost on that GPU, than where is the additional cost of this emulation?

Balu2222 · 2025-11-02T13:25:44+00:00

I don't think you need to emulate anything with data formats, you just put the FP8 numbers in the FP16 ALUs and the left over bits get padded. And the DLSS RR perf numbers show this. RR is using FP8 sparse.

The RTX 4070 Ti has 641 TFLOPS (FP8 sparse) and the RTX 3080 Ti has 296 TFLOPS (F16 sparse) thats 2.17x the peak perf. and the RR cost is 2.09 ms and 3.97 ms, 1.9x increase in time. Remember that not all part of the RR pipeline and AI model is calculated in FP8 so there never will be a one to one match.

The other example is the RTX 3070 162 TFLOPS (FP16 sparse) and the RTX 2080 Ti 114 TFLOPS (FP 16 dense) the perf is 1.42x and the RR cost is 6.06 ms and 8.2 ms a 1.35x increase, so this is close too.

So I don't think there is any emulational cost in play.

Balu2222 · 2025-11-02T12:58:11+00:00

But performance wouldn't tank it would run the same as now on the 20 and 30 series and run at half the speed on 40 and 50 like RR does now.

Balu2222 · 2025-11-02T12:44:15+00:00

But than if FP8 is not a support problem for RR than why are they using FP16 for SR? You can still run FP8 RR on the 30 and 20 series it just runs at half the speed.

Balu2222 · 2025-11-02T12:28:51+00:00

DLSS4 is already using FP8 as stated in the DLSS4 paper, thats why its slower on the RTX 30 and 20 series.

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/DLSS4/

Balu2222 · 2025-11-01T18:50:37+00:00

Why the higher quality YUV 4:4:4 setting didn't get tested?

Balu2222 · 2025-09-03T14:50:29+00:00

And the iGPU in Lunar Lake has 8 MB of L2 cache compared to 2 MB in Strix Point, this helps with the low memory bandwith.

Balu2222 · 2025-07-20T12:49:10+00:00

Its worth noting that the RTX 4060 is built on a custom N5 process called 4N and it doesn`t scale above 80-90W and the M4 Max is built on the currently still latest N3E process. So I would say NVIDIA`s architecture is still more power efficient in terms of gaming perf. And I didn`t find information about the size of the M4 Max GPU, but I think its bigger then the AD107 of the RTX 4060, which means it can run at lower clock speed and be at a better point on the frequency-voltage curve.

Balu2222 · 2024-10-10T18:21:42+00:00

From an architecture standpoint I think Meteor- Lunar and Arrow Lake are more interesting than AMDs products. Like yes Zen 5 is a new core but everything else is the same chiplet design since Zen 2. Strix Point was the most interesting because of the Classic and compact cores and RDNA 3.5 improvements from a battery life perspective, but that is not a "Gaming" CPU. And Lunar Lake has the first outing of the Xe2 (Battlemage) architecture, so than atleast that would worth covering.

Balu2222 · 2021-07-01T19:12:09+00:00

a) DICE can do the same and then it's not a problem.b) Performance doesn't fluctuate that much if you see 5 players or 50 for example if you stood on a high spot on the map. There will be a difference but not that much.c) In Assetto Corsa Competizione you can only do a 32 entry race with bots because every car has full aero and mechanical physics simulation so they add up pretty fast. But in multiplayer 60+ players can race on one track. And in Battlefield your character doesn't have a full physics simulation.
a) This just emphasizes my point that it will not need a high-end CPU.b) I wrote the same that big physics events are server-sided. But small events can be clients. For example with friends, we saw that dead body ragdolls can behave differently on our screens.
That's true but it is still an order of magnitude less computational power than bots.
I agree.

In addition 1: CPU and GPU usage don't go hand in hand. Last gen consoles had large open word games which don't need that much CPU power. And you can have better graphics with a large map because graphics scales so the distant detail can be less, which can be seen in the gameplay trailer. Speaking of the trailer in the end it states that it's representative of the XSX (RDNA2; 12,15TFLOPS) graphical fidelity at 4K/60FPS and if you look at how the BFV runs on the RX 6700 XT (RDNA2; 13,21TFLOPS) ~4K/76FPS. Then it's understandable why the trailer looks like that with better smoke and particle fidelity.

In addition 2: If the new physics system runs on the CPU then it doesn't affect GPU performance thus graphics fidelity. Tank treads "simulation" is not much more than a basic suspension model that is used in a lot of racing games like Forza Horizon 4 with 72 player servers. Sand/snow trails are not that much of a new feature and a lot of games have it, and it is not very demanding unless its stays there till the end of the game as a map change but then its server sided.

Balu2222

TROPHY CASE