☠️There is no way the PC hardware community went from Zen5% and Arrow Lake 2.85% surrounding performance uplifts around gaming only to having an issue with benchmarking CPUs at 720p/1080p in 2024.

Courtesy from u/Voodoo2-SLi from his meta reviews, Zen 4 to Zen 5 we got a 9% uplift in application, 4% uplift in gaming, and 30%, 3% better energy efficiency for application and gaming respectively.

Raptor Lake to Arrow Lake we got a 5% uplift in application, 6% regression in gaming (pre-patch if that means anything in the future), and 40%, 50% better energy efficiency for application and gaming respectively.

/s Guys just buy a 5600 or 12400f and pair it with a 4090 or buy an M4 mac if you truly are disappointed with this gen.

I also want to bring up Steve's other videos to help clarify. Here is the Ryzen 5 3600 vs the best CPUs in 2020, Ryzen 9 3950X and Intel i9-10900K paired with a 3080 and at 4K in this 15 game average there wasn't much if any difference.

3 Years later if you're sticking with the same 3600 and 10900K (well 9900K in the video) BUT pair it with a 4090 look how much a v-cache Ryzen, 5800X3D performs at 4K.

I think Steve said it here in this video the best (6 months ago).

Here is also r/hardware messiah, Steve from Gamers Nexus on the matter (in the pinned comment section):

We currently run tests at 1080p and 1440p for CPU gaming benchmarks, though we mostly rely on 1080p results for comparison. Although we didn't bother for the 9800X3D review, we typically publish 1-3 1440p charts in games that are still mostly CPU-bound for perspective.

There are a lot of ways to approach reviews. We view bottleneck testing as a separate content piece or follow-up, as it also starts getting into territory of functionally producing a GPU benchmark.

What matters is a consistent philosophy: Our primary philosophy is to isolate components as much as possible, then as standalone or separate feature pieces, we run 'combined' tests that mix variables in ways we wouldn't for a standardized reviews. For us, reviews are standardized, meaning all parts (more or less) follow the same test practices. Introducing more judgment calls introduces more room for inconsistency in human decision making, so we try to avoid these wherever possible to keep comparisons fair. Choosing those practices is based upon ensuring we can show the biggest differences in components with reasonably likely workloads.

A few things to remember with benchmarks that are borderline GPU-bound:

- You can no longer fully isolate how much of the performance behavior is due to the CPU, which can obscure or completely hide issues. These issues include: poor frametime pacing, inconsistent frametime delivery, in-game simulation time error due to a low-end CPU dropping animation consistency despite good frame pacing, and overall quality of the experience. This is not only because it becomes more difficult to isolate if issues such as micro stutters are caused by the CPU or GPU, but also because the limitation may completely sidestep major issues with a CPU. One example would be Total War: Warhammer 3, which has a known and specific issue with scheduling on high thread count Intel CPUs in particular. This issue can be hidden or minimized by a heavy GPU bind, and so 4K / Ultra testing would potentially mean we miss a major problem that would directly impact user experience.

- Drawing upon this: We don't test for the experience in only that game, but we use it as a representative of potentially dozens of games that could have that behavior. In the same example, we want that indicator of performance for these reasons: (1) If a user actually does just play in a CPU bind for that game, they need to know that even a high-end parts can perform poorly if CPU-bound; (2) if, in the future, a new GPU launches that shifts the bind back to the CPU, which is likely, we need to be aware of that in the original review so that consumers can plan for their build 2-3 years in the future and not feel burned by a purchase; (3) if the game may represent behavior in other games, it is important to surface a behavior to begin the conversation and search for more or deeper problems. It's not possible to test every single game -- although HUB certainly tries -- and so using fully CPU-bound results as an analog to a wider gaming subset means we know what to investigate, whereas a GPU bind may totally hide that (or may surface GPU issues, which are erroneously attributed to the CPU).

One thing to also remember with modern 1080p testing is that it also represents some situations for DLSS, FSR, or XeSS usage at "4K" (upscaled).

A great example of all of this is to look at common parts from 4-5 years ago, then see how they have diverged with time. If we had been GPU-bound, we'd have never known what that divergence might be.

Finally: One of the major challenges with GPU-bound benchmarks in a CPU review is that the more variable ceiling caused by intermittent GPU 'overload' means CPU results will rarely stack-up in the hierarchy most people expect. This requires additional explanation to ensure responsible use of the data, as it wouldn't be odd to have a "better" CPU (by hierarchy) below a "worse" CPU if both are externally bound.

We still think that high resolution testing is useful for separate deep dives or in GPU bottleneck or GPU review content.