PC gaming made some impressive strides this year, but the most impressive for me was in the area of CPUs, where not only did Intel make some impressive improvements with their aging 14nm++ manufacturing process (honestly, still trying to pull something new out of this node is impressive in itself), but AMD made a minor refresh in the form of their XT chips (remember them? impressive in and of itself), but also a minor refresh by AMD in the form of the XT chip (remember those?). Then came the real game changer: with Zen 3, Intel and AMD's gaming performance is finally equal.

That AMD has finally caught up to Intel's gaming performance may not seem like such a big deal: Ryzen chips offer more threads than Intel's similarly priced alternatives. Threads...Ryzen also has next-generation technology hooks, supporting PCIe 4.0 long before Intel did, as well as impressive memory support across the board. [At the same time, AMD and Intel are having an impressive battle in the mobile space, with Intel's impressive 10nm Ice Lake battling AMD's Renoir chips and Ryzen 9 4900H and others taking the fight to Intel. To be fair, mobile CPUs are outside the scope of this category, but it's worth emphasizing that competition is currently fierce in several segments.

Returning to the main topic, there were a number of releases worth considering in the category of best gaming CPUs this year: previous-generation chips from both Intel and AMD, chips that dethroned Intel's temporary king at the end of the year, the 10-core, 20-thread Core i9 10900K Such as the 10-core, 20-thread Core i9 10900K, which just lost its place at the end of the year, but is still an impressive chip. Anyway, let's get the show on the road.

So there you have it: three contenders for the best gaming CPUs of 2020. We'll announce which CPU surprised us the most on New Year's Eve. In any case, this is a very important year for gaming processors, and I have a feeling that this situation will continue until 2021, when we will see Intel's answer in the form of Rocket Lake. Let's hope that competitors continue to come out with great gaming chips.