With every new hardware release comes the inevitable question: Crysis, one of the first PC games to support DirectX 10, was technically demanding for its time, and was tough on the hardware at launch. 3990X would have been able to run Crysis on everything but itself had it existed at the time.

In other words, you don't need the graphics capabilities of a GPU, and Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips demonstrated this in a video posted on YouTube, running Crysis in software mode on AMD's muscle chip. Let's take a look.

Running Crysis and running it well are two very different things. Says Lynas, "To put it bluntly, it's not great." But the fact that it runs at all is pretty impressive.

Also, if you don't mind the choppiness, you can play with it to some extent. This underscores how far the processor has come. Of course, no one should consider the Threadripper chip strictly for a gaming PC (there is no CPU that is ideal for gaming that costs as much as the 3990X), nor for playing Crysis. However, as a technical demonstration, running games on the CPU alone will reveal what kind of power the 3990X offers.

The 3990X is the top of the Threadripper stack; the 3990X is based on AMD's latest generation Zen 2 CPU architecture with 64 cores and 128 threads. It has a base clock of 2.9 GHz, a maximum boost clock of 4.3 GHz, and 256 MB of L3 cache. While it is absolutely capable for the right kind of workloads, gaming is not its target; it is possible to build a gaming PC around the 3990X, but at nearly $4,000 for the CPU alone, the cost-performance ratio is a head-scratcher. [Note that the CPU, at least as far as this demo is concerned, is not built to handle intense graphics information the way a GPU does. However, the 3990X has so much raw power that it can give Crysis a spirited run for its money.