I have some extra money to put toward my PC and am trying to improve gaming performance. My current system has a Ryzen 7 7700X, an RTX 4070 Super, and 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL30 memory. I mainly play Wuthering Waves, Marvel Rivals, and other FPS games at 1080p. In Wuthering Waves, I use maximum settings with ray tracing enabled and average around 60 FPS. I lower settings in competitive FPS games to maximize frame rates. The 7800X3D is available for about $160 after discounts, and I expect to sell my 7700X for roughly the same amount. Would switching to the 7800X3D noticeably improve performance, or would I be better off saving for a graphics card upgrade?
3 Answers
If both components are sitting around 70%, the frame-rate limit may be caused by the game's engine, a single busy CPU thread, shader compilation, or an in-game cap rather than a simple lack of hardware power. Overall CPU usage can look low even when one core is limiting performance. Try checking per-core usage and testing with ray tracing disabled or a lower rendering resolution. At 1080p, the 7800X3D might improve minimum FPS in some situations, but I would not buy it expecting Wuthering Waves to suddenly jump far beyond 60 FPS.
At $160 after selling the 7700X, the 7800X3D is a reasonable drop-in upgrade if you want better minimums in competitive games and plan to keep the AM5 platform for years. Just update the motherboard BIOS first and make sure the memory settings remain stable. For the specific 60-FPS issue, though, investigate whether Wuthering Waves is engine-limited before spending money; a GPU upgrade would only help if the 4070 Super is actually the limiting component.
The 7800X3D could help in some CPU-heavy games, but it probably will not be a dramatic upgrade from the 7700X for your current setup. Since you are playing at 1080p, check your GPU usage, individual CPU-core usage, and frametime graph rather than only looking at overall CPU usage. If the GPU is close to 95–100% while playing Wuthering Waves, a faster CPU will not solve the problem. A meaningful GPU upgrade from a 4070 Super would be fairly expensive, so I would probably save your money unless you can confirm a CPU bottleneck.
Both my CPU and GPU average around 70% usage during heavy sections, so neither one seems to be fully maxed out.