AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Gaming and Workstation Review – Some highlights in workstation applications and not consistent in games

1 - Einführung, Vorbemerkung und CPU-Daten 2 - Test-Setup und Methoden 3 - Gaming Performance HD Ready (1280 x 720 Pixels) 4 - Gaming Performance Full HD (1920 x 1080 Pixels) 5 - Gaming Performance WQHD (2560 x 1440 Pixels) 6 - Gaming Performance Ultra-HD (3840 x 2160 Pixels) 7 - Autodesk AutoCAD 2023 8 - Autodesk Inventor 2021 Pro 9 - Rendering, Simulation, Financial, Programming 10 - Wissenschaft und Mathematik 11 - Workstation: Leistungsaufnahme und Effizienz 12 - Gaming: Leistungsaufnahme und Effizienz 13 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit

It wasn’t easy to find the right attributes for AMD’s new Ryzen 9 9950X and the right headline for the test article. But while I was able to pull myself out of the noose elegantly with a relatively large amount of text, AMD will probably still have to sit, sweat and make a lot of improvements. There were certainly other reasons for the delay than just a supposed misprint on some IHS. It was certainly not advisable to launch this CPU a week ago as the spearhead and first model in the new Ryzen 9000 series. And yes, they should have taken much more time.

Apart from the company’s own benchmarks in unrealistic marketing lyricism, AMD will still have to straighten out a few things to get back into the plus compared to the Ryzen 7000. The potential is definitely there, but of course it needs to be found first. That’s why I ask you to read the foreword very carefully, because things are often not as they seem, or at least should seem, but simply aren’t. Efficiency alone may win you a flowerpot, but without flowers and soil. And even this advantage still needs to be questioned.

Important preliminary remark

The Ryzen 9 9950X is something of a Janus face, because it has two sides. Once it works as it should, there is hardly any stopping it, at most at the power socket. However, such aha moments are widely scattered and mostly limited to the workstation sector. If we take gaming alone, then I’m sure that we’ll see differences in the conclusions of all the reviews this time that we’ve never seen before. Because if I had only replaced two games in which the new CPU either performs disproportionately better than the direct predecessor model (up to 10%) or, conversely, one of the many games where nothing (yet) really works (up to -10%), then this CPU could either have been specifically praised or completely slated. And without a guilty conscience.

Things like a fresh Windows 11 image and calling start /wait Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks including the latest chipset drivers are a matter of course, so that wasn’t the problem, even if I don’t consider this procedure to be customer-friendly. Such hurdles are definitely not reasonable for end customers and potential AM5 upgrades from a single-die processor.

AMD can actually be quite satisfied with my random selection, which has always been used, because it documents a performance-related parity with the Ryzen 9 7950X with a significantly more moderate consumption behaviour, whereby the spread across the board is likely to be more pronounced. And in the end, everyone will certainly be right again, depending on the benchmark selection. That’s exactly why I’ve done a lot of workstation tests, which demonstrate this up and down very well and which you should definitely read for a better understanding. So, depending on the game selection, there will be very different interpretations, which could also help AMD to loosen its own shackles by actively eliminating the bottlenecks that have been identified.

I’m leaving out the microcode update for Intel CPUs, which has only just been released, because it wouldn’t change the overall result and would only have stolen the time needed for longer workstation tests. However, I ran all games with a Core i9-14900K again in 720p and noticed a maximum performance loss of 1 to 1.5%. If at all. More has already been left behind in the course of all the other patches and updates and anyone who knows where the tolerance limits are will certainly not cry over 1 or 2 FPS.

Fine Wine is of course a hackneyed term, but at least the Ryzen 7000s now do exactly what you could read in the slides at launch and what is still so sorely lacking in the Ryzen 9000. I also had to replace a motherboard unplanned in the test system, although nothing absolutely identical could be found in the short time available on a weekend. I am therefore testing the Ryzen 9 9950X on an MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk WiFi, on which only the connectivity is limited. In terms of performance, no differences were measurable in random tests with the CPUs already measured on the MSI MEG X670E Ace. This is therefore not the reason for the unrestrained proliferation of results.

The new Ryzen 5 9950X at a glance

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is based on the new Zen 5 architecture and is a high-end processor with 16 cores and 32 threads. It offers a maximum turbo frequency of 5.7 GHz and a base clock of 4.3 GHz. The processor is manufactured using the 4 nm process and has a thermal design power (TDP) of 170 watts, which can rise to 230 watts under load. The cache is divided into 16 MB L2 and 64 MB L3, resulting in a total size of 80 MB. The 9950X supports DDR5 memory with a speed of up to 5600 MHz and is compatible with the AM5 socket.

The chip has been designed to offer a significant improvement in instruction per clock cycles (IPC) of around 16% compared to the previous Zen 4 architecture. Despite a slight decrease in the base clock frequency compared to its predecessor, the performance increases should be particularly noticeable in the area of multi-threaded applications and gaming. AMD relies on TSMC’s 4 nm process for production, which enables higher efficiency and density of the transistors compared to previous generations. In production, AMD relies on its proven chiplet architecture, in which the CCDs (Core Complex Dies) are produced separately from the I/O DIE. This makes it possible to optimize production costs while ensuring high scalability and flexibility

However, in order not to repeat myself in detail at this point, I will simply let the slides speak for themselves, as they contain everything once again. The only thing I can’t quite understand is the values that AMD gives for the Intel CPUs. Yes, after all the new updates and with different settings it has become significantly less, but I can’t quite get to the bars in the slides. I’ll leave that without comment, but I think it’s a throwback to a long-forgotten marketing comedy in places.

And for the very inquisitive and / or forgetful, there is also a foliated deep dive through the Zen5 architecture. That should be enough of an introduction for now.