The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X Review: Flagship Zen 5 Soars - and Stalls

Conclusion

Given that we've already seen the performance that AMD has to offer with Zen 5 on desktops (Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X), we were highly anticipating AMD launching the Ryzen 9 SKUs. In fact, I think everyone looking to see how the flagship Zen 5 chip performs has been waiting for the launch of the premium SKUs from the Ryzen 9000 series: the Ryzen 9 9950X and the Ryzen 9 9900X. 

As of tomorrow, all of AMD's announced Ryzen 9000 series chips at Computex 2024 will be available to purchase. But even with a lower insertion price than the Ryzen 7000 series SKU for SKU, does Zen 5 do enough to tempt you from your hard-earned money? At the time of writing, while there are clear gains for opting for Zen 5 over Zen 4 in situations where the Zen 5 core can chew through intensive workloads, especially AVX-512 (thanks AMD for a full 512-bit datapath), then yes, Zen 5 certainly is the architecture to go for. But that's where things get awry.

We're going to dive straight into our analysis of the performance of both the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X:

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & 9900X Performance Analysis

While there's a massive difference between single-threaded and multi-threaded performance, it's essential for a processor in the modern world to combine both in one package. The Ryzen 9 9950X shines with its 16 cores of Zen 5 in intensive multi-threaded workloads, which shows the flagship Zen 5 chip in the best light. Another area where Zen 5 shines in single-threaded performance is when an AVX workload is present, as AMD now has a full 512-bit SIMD for AVX-512 workloads, which is something the rest of the competition doesn't have; Ryzen 7000 has 2 x 256-bit datapaths for AVX and Intel? Well, they don't support it whatsoever.

Using Y-Cruncher to calculate a 5M digit deep calculation of Pi, we can see both the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X, as well as the other Zen 5 tests, decimate the competition in a single-threaded workload that employs an AVX-512 workload.

Looking at a typical multi-threaded rendering benchmark, the Ryzen 9 9950X is around 6% faster than the Intel Core i9-14900K (At Intel spec), while it is around 8% faster than the chip it replaces (Ryzen 9 7950X). Despite having four fewer cores, the Ryzen 9 9900X also performs well and is only 10% behind the Ryzen 9 7950X.

An example of more multi-threaded wins for the Ryzen 9 9950X comes in Blender 3.6, which is an intensive workload. Not only is it around 9% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X, but it's a whopping 37% faster than the Core i9-14900K in this instance. In contrast, the Ryzen 9 9900X is only around 15% slower than the 7950X but is much faster than the Ryzen 9 7900 by around 31%.

In gaming, we're experiencing issues with AMD's core parking feature, which they state is designed to boost performance by containing all of a game's threads within a single CCD. Even with the PPM provisioning driver installed, we have experienced examples where random cores fire up outside of this, which we believe is impacting performance sporadically. It makes it really hard to gauge the over-efficacy of the Ryzen 9 processors. To be frank, AMD's multi-CCD chips need to just work as intended; but as our testing shows, the core parking feature doesn't seem to be doing the intended job. Because it's so random and sporadic, it could happen at any point during any gaming run, so correcting any issues is paramount. 

The Ryzen 9 9950X performs better than the Ryzen 9 7950X for the most part in our test suite, by around 8-9%, especially in multi-threaded workloads, but we would really like to re-test gaming on the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X once any issues with core parking are ironed out; hence the disclaimer in our game testing section of the suite.

Final Thoughts: Zen 5 Shines in Multi-Threaded, Core Parking Issues Spoil The Show

Since AMD announced the SKUs at Computex 2024, we've been looking forward to having the full stack of Ryzen 9000 series processors, all equipped with Zen 5 cores, available. While we were slightly underwhelmed by the performance displayed in our Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X reviews, we had high hopes for the flagship Ryzen 9 chips. 

Although we didn't see as much difference from going to Zen 5 from Zen 4 with 8C/16T, we can certainly see a benefit in opting for the Ryzen 9 9950X, which costs $649, over the previous Ryzen 9 7950X, which launched at $699. In multi-threaded workloads and even in single-threaded performance, the 9950X delivers plenty of performance. However, on average, this is under 10% in terms of overall gains MT-wise, going from the Ryzen 9 7950X. But that's still around the typical gen-on-gen performance upgrade we've typically seen throughout the years – especially when AMD isn't getting the advantage of moving up to a major new process node.

When it comes to the Ryzen 9 9900X, we believe it represents a nice boost over the Ryzen 9 7900, and it performs not too far from the performance levels of the Ryzen 9 7950X, which we really like to see. Of course, in intensive multi-threaded applications, having 16 good cores is usually better than 12 great cores. Still, with an MSRP of $499, the Ryzen 9 9900X is certainly a solid offering that not only bridges the gap between the mid-range and high-end segments nicely but also delivers in terms of performance.

Unfortunately, the issues we experienced with the PPM Provisioning driver, despite following all of AMD's guidelines and then some, has undermined this launch. So far we've seen core parking cause quite a few issues in performance, most notably in gaming. If it was an issue limited to just our testing, that could be negated, but having checked with a few of our colleagues, it looks to be a widespread issue. Something just doesn't seem to be working in the core parking department, as we ourselves have observed random cores from the parked CCX firing up randomly and taking game threads with them, and this in itself seems in defiance of what AMD is trying to achieve by running gaming workloads within a single CCX. 

For now, the Ryzen 9 9950X/9900X seem like fine chips for highly threaded productivity workloads. They're just not delivering the correct behavior for games. In the meantime, we'll be continuing to look into the issue, and should AMD deliver an update that fixes Ryzen 9000's core parking behavior, we will reevaluate these chips accordingly.