AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X review: not for gamers

AMD claims its new Ryzen 9 9950X is the best processor the world has ever seen, and by some metrics, that’s accurate. It’s the flagship of AMD’s new Zen 5 range, promising performance on a level we’ve never seen before. Unfortunately, a lot of AMD’s promises don’t hold up in practice.

The gen-on-gen improvements are here, and AMD claimed some victories it lost to Intel last year. But between lower pricing on last-gen Zen 4 CPUs and AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech running away with gaming performance, the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X are caught in an awkward spot. It’s hard to recommend them right now.

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That will change. These new CPUs will drop in price as Zen 4 models disappear from shelves, and they’ll become the default AMD options. Unlike the previous generation where you felt the generational jump in every application, Zen 5 feels more tame. They’ll eventually be the de facto options for AMD, but we’re not there today.

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X specs

Not much has changed with the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X compared to their last-gen counterparts. AMD stuck with the same core configuration, cache amount, and even maximum boost clock speed. The only major difference in the specs is power, and that’s just for the Ryzen 9 9900X. It comes with a TDP of 120 watts, while the Ryzen 9 7900X went up to 170W.

Pricing is what stands out most, however. For both Ryzen 9 models, AMD shaved $50 off the recommended price. That sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is, however. As we saw with Zen 4, AMD will quickly slash the price on new CPUs just weeks after they launch. These new recommended prices set better expectations for what you’ll actually spend on a CPU.

Even more important, AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs are dirt cheap right now. At the time of writing, the Ryzen 9 7950X is around $520 and the Ryzen 9 7900X is around $360. Prices on last-gen products always drop when there’s a new generation hitting the store shelves, but I’d keep those prices in mind during the course of this review. The margins for Zen 5 aren’t always that big, despite the fact that the CPUs will be much more expensive at retailers.

The specs are mostly the same, but AMD made changes in the architecture. Zen 5 brings a dedicated 512-bit data path for AVX-512 instructions, as well as a clear focus on single-core performance. In the areas where those performance details matter, Zen 5 runs away. Everywhere else, the gains aren’t as significant.

Test setup

As usual, I put together two nearly identical test benches for my results you’ll see below. The vast majority of the data below is fresh, which I collected within the last week. There are some older models I brought in for a few benchmarks, such as the Core i9-12900K in Cinebench and Ryzen 9 5950X in Handbrake that I didn’t retest, though those results still followed the same process that I applied to all of the CPUs I retested here.

Tech media as a whole is still working out the Zen 5 architecture, and there’s been plenty of debate just within the past week about how to get the best performance out of the chips. There’s some testing that suggests turning off simultaneous multi-threading can give a big gaming boost, for example. For the purposes of this review, I didn’t mess around in the BIOS to squeeze out extra performance. Short of turning on Resizable BAR and enabling the memory overclocking profile, I left everything at its default setting and kept AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive set to Auto.

On the point of the BIOS, I didn’t test Intel’s new microcode update that’s supposed to fix a wave of instability on 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs. I only had the Z690 motherboard listed above to test with, and the microcode update isn’t available for that board yet. Thankfully, that shouldn’t affect performance much. Some early impressions suggest the performance loss is 2% at most.

Productivity performance

AMD is back on top with these new Zen 5 CPUs, and sometimes in a big way. Setting the stage is Cinebench R23 and its multi-core test. Given that AMD kept the core counts the same, I didn’t expect much movement in Cinebench, but I was wrong. The Ryzen 9 9950X is 12% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X and 10% faster than the Core i9-14900K, while the Ryzen 9 9900X outpaces its last-gen counterpart by a massive 16%.

That’s a critical number to keep in mind. AMD claims Zen 5 brings a 16% increase in Instructions Per Clock (IPC) compared to Zen 4, which should show up in single-core performance. The chips fall a little short of expectations in Cinebench’s single-core test. Both CPUs were 12% faster than their last-gen counterparts. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s still not quite the 16% AMD suggested.

AMD definitely gets closer in real applications. In Blender, the Ryzen 9 9950X was 11% faster than its last-gen version, but the Ryzen 9 9900X was close to 15% faster.

Similarly, in Handbrake, the Ryzen 9 9950X completed the transcode 14% faster than its last-gen counterpart, while the Ryzen 9 9900X matched the Ryzen 9 7950X and outclassed its last-gen version by 10%. The Ryzen 9 5950X provides some important context here, though. The jump between Zen 3 and Zen 4 was significantly bigger than the jump from Zen 4 to Zen 5.

AMD leads in other benchmarks, too, but the margins aren’t much to take note of. As you can see in both Photoshop and 7-Zip, the new Zen 5 CPUs were just a hair faster than their Zen 4 versions. Faster is faster, sure, but it’s important to keep in mind that the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 7900X are significantly cheaper now.

One test where there was a massive difference was Y-Cruncher. This app calculates 500 million digits of Pi, and the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X are in a completely different league when it comes to single-core performance. There isn’t much to talk about with multi-core performance, however.

Finally, there’s Jetstream 2, which is a browser-based benchmark that tests a load of browser applications. We’re dealing with flagships here, so browser performance isn’t a top concern. Still, AMD is back on top after losing some ground to the Core i9-14900K last year.

Overall, we’re dealing with an uplift of around 10% to 15%. That’s not bad, but it’s important to keep AMD’s performance claims in mind. The company originally said the Ryzen 9 9950X would lead the Core i9-14900K by up to 56% in Blender and 55% in Handbrake, and that’s not even close to the results I saw. These two CPUs aren’t bad, but AMD really didn’t set the right expectations for Zen 5. What was billed as a new foundation for AMD moving forward feels more like a minor refresh of the Zen 4 models we had before.

Gaming performance

On average, the Ryzen 9 9950X is 5% faster than its last-gen counterpart and 2% faster than the Core i9-14900K. If you take a quick look at my average above, you’ll realize that’s not my claim. That’s AMD’s claim. Even according to AMD’s own internal benchmarks, which it shared with reviewers for validation purposes, these new Zen 5 CPUs provide a performance uplift in the low single digits compared to the competition from Intel and AMD’s own (much cheaper) last-gen options.

My average is a bit different — AMD is around 5% faster than its last-gen options and 3% slower than Intel’s Core i9 options. It’s important to set the stage here with both averages because swapping out a couple of games could completely change the standings when you’re dealing with low single-digit performance differences. Adding Starfield would make the margin more narrow, while adding League of Legends would widen the gap. Even between different CPUs of the same model, you can see about a 1% to 2% difference in performance.

Those narrow margins become less important when you’re dealing with big jumps in performance like we saw with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. If the CPU is 15% faster than some competitors on average, that could show up as 13% or 17% — either way, you’re arriving at a similar conclusion. The CPU isn’t as sensitive to the suite of games tested because it has such a large performance uplift. That’s not the case with Zen 5.

Starting with the most clear win is Ashes of the Singularity. Both the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X provided an identical result, bypassing every other CPU I tested. This is more of a glorified CPU benchmark than a game that’s widely played, but it’s a good gut check to make sure that something isn’t wildly off with the test bench.

My results aren’t all that simple, though. If you look at Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail, there’s technically a generational improvement, but it’s so minor that it might as well not even exist. Meanwhile AMD’s own Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Intel’s latest Core i9 CPUs break through the barrier that AMD’s Ryzen 9 models ran up against.

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is really the elephant in the room when it comes to gaming. Why in the world would you buy a $650 CPU when a last-gen chip that’s $350 is often faster in games? Hitman 3 and Far Cry 6 put that on full display. Sure, there’s a good uplift with the new Ryzen 9 parts compared to their last-gen counterparts, but it really doesn’t matter. In both cases, you’d go with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D every time if your concern is gaming.

I also tested Red Dead Redemption 2 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, which are included in the average at the top of this section. I won’t belabor the point, though. In both games, I saw a minor — almost negligible — uplift gen-on-gen, but the Ryzen 7 7800X3D still wins every time.

The other game I tested, which wasn’t included in the average, was F1 2022. You can see the chart above, but I wouldn’t take it at face value. AMD suggests the data is wrong, but I still haven’t gotten an explanation why. What’s strange is that I saw the same regression with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X, suggesting this is a larger Zen 5 issue. And even after doing a clean install of Windows between CPUs, keeping everything consistent from the memory to the motherboard, and averaging out multiple runs into a single number, the performance decrease remained.

For every game I benchmarked, I ran three passes and averaged the result you see in the charts above. That’s an attempt to get as close as possible to some objective truth about how these CPUs perform, but it really doesn’t help in this case. The margins are so narrow gen-on-gen that cherry-picking one high result for a Zen 5 CPU and one low result for a Zen 4 CPU would suggest a wider gap than there actually is.

It’s clear now after testing the Ryzen 9 parts that Zen 5 isn’t built for gamers. That’s actually not a terrible thing, though. Prices on Zen 4 CPUs are extremely low right now, and if your primary focus is gaming, you can get a bargain since you don’t have to shell out for the latest and greatest. Even the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, AMD’s previous crown jewel of both gaming and productivity, is $125 cheaper than the Ryzen 9 9950X is launching at.

I need to show one final chart before moving onto some conclusions, and that’s LeelaChessZero. This is an AI chess engine that uses AVX-512 instructions, and unsurprisingly, the Zen 5 parts are way faster than everything else. That doesn’t really change the conclusion on gaming performance, but it’s good to know the 512-bit data path is working well if you really want to emulate PlayStation 3 games or something.

Not built for gaming

AMD is in a tough spot. The Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X provide decent gen-on-gen gains, and they throw the ball back in Intel’s court in productivity, but they fall completely flat when it comes to gaming. AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech is fantastic, but it’s led to a level of segmentation within AMD’s CPU lineup that’s tough to navigate. Maybe that explains why we saw such poor Zen 4 sales out of the gate in the previously generation.

Even without the X3D factor, AMD is really its own worst enemy with Ryzen 9000. I only saw big performance leaps in a few applications, and considering how cheap Ryzen 7000 CPUs are, giving up a bit of performance to save a lot of money is the way to go for most buyers.

The Intel comparison is even more concerning. AMD is picking up victories with its new CPUs, and some of them are quite large. However, Intel’s Arrow Lake chips are expected to arrive before the end of the year. Considering the narrow margins between the Ryzen 9 9950X and Core i9-14900K in many applications, AMD might not hold onto the performance crown for long.