AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X review: mystifying performance

Per week in the past we regarded on the barely underwhelming AMD Ryzen 9600X and 9700X, which have been marked by modest gaming performance will increase in some titles, extra considerably higher content material creation grunt and barely higher thermals. Now it is time to have a look at the second half of AMD’s Zen 5 quartet, the £459/$499 Ryzen 9 9900X and £609/$649 Ryzen 9 9950X. These are highly effective 12-core and 16-core elements that should be extra of curiosity to content material creators than players, so do they make a greater case for Ryzen 9000? And does both one handle to exceed the top-level gaming performance of the 7800X3D?

Sadly, after 4 days of frantic benchmarking and troubleshooting, I am undecided AMD has succeeded on both of those factors. Our Ryzen 9900X and 9950X testing has been marked by confusingly poor gaming performance, together with performance regressions versus the 7900X and 7950X, alongside a couple of examples of real uplifts that nonetheless do not go far sufficient to creating these CPUs value recommending.

This assessment does no less than mark the debut of two enhancements to our benchmarking suite in comparison with final week’s opinions, which itself marked the introduction of a completely new automated benchmarking system for Digital Foundry – and due to this fact solely included a extra restricted collection of video games than we have supplied prior to now.

Zen 5 makes use of 4nm CCDs versus the 5nm course of used for Zen 4, whereas the I/O die stays on 6nm. | Picture credit score: AMD/Digital Foundry

First, we have added 720p knowledge – along with the 1080p, 1440p and 4K knowledge – which some individuals favor for CPU benchmarking because it takes the GPU much more out of the equation. Second, we have added two new video games in new genres: Counter-Strike 2 to symbolize aggressive shooters and Starfield to symbolize Bethesda-style RPGs. Each provide a stern problem for contemporary CPUs, particularly with the upper refresh price screens now frequent. In fact, we’ll proceed to develop our testing sooner or later, with some thrilling potentialities on the horizon.

Based mostly on our 9600X and 9700X outcomes final week, whereas gaming performance would not match the tempo of enchancment in earlier Ryzen generations, we do no less than count on to see an inexpensive uptick in content material creation performance. That is because of a rise in IPC (directions per clock, an indicator of single-core grunt), whereas clockspeeds, energy utilization and thermals stay flat or barely improved. As with the 9600X and 9700X, the single-core positive factors come as a mix of architectural enhancements (resembling an improved department predictor, higher AVX-512 help and doubled knowledge bandwidth between L2 to L1 caches) and the swap to a extra environment friendly 4nm CCD.

With that in thoughts, the 9900X is rated at a decrease 120W TDP than the 170W 7900X – although the 9950X is on the identical 170W mark because the 7950X it replaces. Improved thermal resistance additionally signifies that temperatures on the identical TDP should be decrease – AMD claims a 7°C discount at matched TDPs, which is arguably extra necessary in these excessive core depend merchandise extra typically used for all-core workloads that maximise temperatures.

A really skilled check rig setup, that includes a Ryzen 9000 processor, RTX 4090, ASRock Taichi X670E and the Alphacool Aurora Eisbaer 240mm AiO. | Picture credit score: Digital Foundry

As recommended by AMD, we’re utilizing an analogous bodily setup to our earlier Ryzen 7000 testing, together with an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard, G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM and an Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO. The large distinction is that our RTX 3090 has been swapped out for an RTX 4090 Founders Version, offering additional graphics performance to push fashionable CPUs even tougher.

Whereas Ryzen 9000 is the star of the present, we additionally examined a collection of earlier Ryzen 3000 and 5000 processors and a collection of Intel’s 14th-gen processors. Our Intel CPU testing was carried out on the Gigabyte Aorus Z790 Master utilizing the identical DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM, whereas AM4 CPUs have been examined on the basic Asus ROG Crosshair 8 Hero with a Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 CL16 equipment.

For storage, we’re utilizing a 4TB Lexar NM790 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD and 4TB Kingston KC3000. Our rig is accomplished with a 1000W Corsair RM1000x energy provide. Testing was carried out on a recent set up of Home windows 11 with the most recent Home windows updates (23H2), chipset drivers (6.06.28.910) and BIOS revisions (3.06 for the ASRock AM5 board) put in.

Earlier than we get into the gaming benchmarks, it is value spending a while wanting on the outcomes of our content material creation testing. These function artificial benchmarks for players, suggesting sure ranges of performance we would count on in a best-case situation, and after all they may also be a helpful indicator for those who truly intend to make use of a Ryzen 9000 CPU for 3D modelling or video manufacturing. These 12-core and 16-core elements are typically spectacular performers, and fortunately that’s the case for Zen 5 as properly.

We’ll look to develop this in future, however for now we now have three workloads: Cinebench 2024 and R20 simulate the 3D modelling and animation program Cinema 4D, whereas Handbrake is actually simply transcoding an early DF Patreon video into H264 and H265 codecs – a typical process for anybody that works with video.

Let us take a look at the Cinebench 2024 outcomes first, that are recorded after a ten minute plus loop to make sure CPUs aren’t in a position to shortly knock in rating earlier than thermal or energy limits kick in. Right here we see single-core enhancements within the ~15 p.c vary for each CPUs over their predecessors, whereas multi-core positive factors are a bit extra modest: 11 p.c for each. For context, Intel’s 14700K is 11 p.c quicker than the 9900X on this check, however the 9950X outduels the 14900K by round six p.c.

Cinebench R20 is a legacy check for us, having run in an enormous variety of earlier CPU opinions, and so we thought it was value working as properly in case you wished to return and examine outcomes. We noticed comparable margins right here gen-on-gen (+11 p.c multi-core for each Ryzen 9000 CPUs).

Our remaining check is the Handbrake transcode check, the place we convert an 822MB 4K video file utilizing the H264 and H265 codecs utilizing the Manufacturing Customary preset set to CRF 18. We’re utilizing the newest model of Handbrake right here, 1.8.1, which helpfully exhibits its statistics within the utility window slightly than burying the typical encoding frame-rate in a log file.

These transcode outcomes present a a lot smaller benefit for Ryzen 9000, one thing we additionally discovered with the 9600X and 9700X. That is round 5 p.c in H264 and eight p.c in H265 for the 9900X and 9950X over their quick predecessors – maybe because of these AVX architectural enhancements.

We did not have the prospect to experiment with PBO and different performance enhancements this time round, however we did see an honest soar on the expense of energy effectivity with the 9700X and I would count on that the 9900X and 9950X will get meaningfully quicker in the event you disregard the inventory energy and thermal price range.

With our content material creation benchmarks accomplished, it is time for the sport benchmarks. Sadly, it is largely downhill from right here.

AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X evaluation