The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X Review: Flagship Zen 5 Soars - and Stalls
by Gavin Bonshor on August 14, 2024 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Desktop
- Zen 5
- AM5
- Ryzen 9000
- Ryzen 9 9950X
- Ryzen 9 9900X
CPU Benchmark Performance: Rendering
Rendering tests, compared to others, are often a little more simple to digest and automate. All the tests put out some sort of score or time, usually in an obtainable way that makes it fairly easy to extract. These tests are some of the most strenuous in our list, due to the highly threaded nature of rendering and ray-tracing, and can draw a lot of power.
If a system is not properly configured to deal with the processor's thermal requirements, the rendering benchmarks are where it would show most easily as the frequency drops over a sustained period of time. Most benchmarks, in this case, are re-run several times, and the key to this is having an appropriate idle/wait time between benchmarks to allow temperatures to normalize from the last test.
Now, it's no surprise to see that the 16C/32T Ryzen 9 9950X dominates the multi-threaded rendering benchmarks; this is well and truly where this chip shines. The Ryzen 9 9950X takes the crown in all of the multi-threaded benchmarks. Interestingly, in the Cinebench R23 single-thread, the Intel Core i9-14900K sits above the pack even when dialed down to Intel's recommended specs. This turns slightly in the latest CineBench 2024 benchmark, where Zen 5 shows it's the top dog. In Blender 3.6, the Ryzen 9 9950X is comfortably quicker than the competition, while the 9900X shows it's certainly no slouch by beating the Core i9-14900K and coming close to the Ryzen 9 7950X, despite having 4 fewer cores.
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Khanan - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
“AMD has doubled the amount of L2 cache per core on Zen 5 to 1 MB, which is up from 512KB per Zen 4 core.”This isn’t right. L2 cache was already doubled from Zen 3 to Zen 4 to 1 MB, you already did this mistake a few times now.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
You are correct! That has been fixed. Thank you.eva02langley - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
I saw Steve and Steve still going strong with their nonsense. They were complaining again so I came here to have a REAL CPU review.Good old Anandtech is still setting the bar for what I should expect in a CPU review.
Khanan - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
I mean the chief reason for these architectures, as AMD uses Zen 5 chiplets also in the server, is the server or data center not desktops - that’s where the big money is. And after that laptops. So AMD doesn’t worry too much about those gaming YouTubers that hype everything as YouTubers always do despite it not making too much sense or having low relevance. What those want is the X3D processors anyway, those are for the gamers specifically, these aren’t as much, these are general architectures reused for the desktop (just not 1:1 in the laptop anymore).eva02langley - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
You don't teach me anything, I know that already.My point is that they are complaining because they are focusing on games while a CPU IPC is NOT limited to gaming, on the contrary, it is a really small portion of it.
Phoronix came out with a 17.5% geomean over the 7950x, well inline or even better than AMD's 16% IPC uplift.
thestryker - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
Keep in mind the only reason Phoronix saw that much uplift is the AVX512 change not because they're actually that much improved. They mentioned at the end of the review that they'll be doing further testing without AVX512 for comparisons.Oxford Guy - Friday, August 16, 2024 - link
Greatly improved AVX-512 is more of an improvement than we've seen from some CPU releases.coburn_c - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
Not true at all, GN repeatedly said don't buy these chips for gaming. YOU are complaining without focusing, and you look like a clown.Gothmoth - Saturday, August 24, 2024 - link
indeed he looks like a very dumb clown.....Lonyo - Thursday, August 15, 2024 - link
GAMERS Nexus is focusing on GAME performance?