Well this is highly disappointing, especially considering this is the last of Socket AM4, with Zen 4 coming on a new socket. Would you buy a new motherboard just to support one generation of processors, when the next will come with such massive improvements like PCIe 5, DDR5, and USB4, especially since you just spent $300+ on an X370/X470 board a year or two? I sure as heck ain't, and I have a feeling quite a number of people will feel the same.
Per https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2020/05/07/the-exciting-future-of-amd-socket-am4 And AMD's official side:
Boom. Told ya: https://wccftech.com/amd-adds-support-zen-3-processors-to-x470-and-b450-motherboards/
Well done AMD and thank you 
To use Intel as an example, what possible reason do any owners of Intel 9 series chips have to upgrade to the new 10 series? Requires a new motherboard yet has no performance advantage (when overclocked) and only marginal performance gain (7%) when comparing to non overclocked. This is likely going to be the same story with Zen 3. Even if they somehow manage to improve performance over the 3900X by 25%, you're only talking a geomean of about 25fps for an investment of what will likely be $750 or more if you don't have a 500 series board (or have a one of the capable 400 series boards). For that same price tag you could get a 2080 Super, or Ampere's replacement, and gain much more than 25fps...
The AnviNext game engine it uses has its roots in 2007, so terrible optimization would be my primary thought. If I understand it correctly, it has never been rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of more modern hardware the way the IdTech and Unreal engines are. Compatibility with Windows 7 likely also served a role in that, but that's finally gone, and the drive to incorporate ray tracing and other features found in DirectX 12 and Vulkan should finally serve to push all games going forward to use updated and modernized game engines. Sadly it won't help players of ACO and other such games, especially MMOs.
But look at the bright side, by 2028 you'll be able to play a game at 4k60 that was released a decade or more earlier on a midrange GPU. The way it's looking if Ampere and RDNA2 deliver on their promises, within 5 years The Witcher 3, for example, will have gone from slideshow on the high end at 4K in 2015 to a smooth 60+ on the lower end of midrange cards (the $300 segment). Granted the REDengine 3 used in TW3 was rebuilt and reoptimized for modern hardware in 2015.
Ok fair one black_zion I had a run through of the ACO benchmark watching gpu utilisation graph and it is fully utilised. I disagree the card is underpowered though, it's just that its architecture derives from gpu accelerator tech (14.2 tflops!) so game devs have to build games in such a way that it utilises it properly. See attached but Vega VII beat 2080 and I think at least equalled 2080ti in World War Z, Battlefield V (possibly forza horizon too from memory). pokester - game's badly optimised
And that's why you look at a large sample size, in this case 21 games, of TechPowerUp's review article on the MSI RTX 2070 Super Gaming X. But this is getting out of the scope of this topic.
Yes, but my point was that most games aren't optimised to leverage the tech Vega VII offers. Vega was pushed out quick to try and compete but I think what we're seeing with Navi and big Navi next, is much more time invested to architect towards the way the games work this time. It will be fascinating to see the results but yes, off topic . I've still so many games that are entirely cpu bottlenecked so bring on matisse refresh (3850x?) and Zen3!
p.s. under water cooling the above graphs don't really count, I'm running near to 2000mhz much of the time (sustained), no throttle/perma boost so the frames are very decent. The 16gb HBM2 comes in useful sometimes for games like Division 2 that use ~13gb of Vram for 1440p
