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
Gaming Performance: 720p
The reason we test games in CPU reviews at lower resolutions such as 720p and below is simple; titles are more likely to be CPU bound than they are GPU bound at lower resolutions. This means there are more frames for the processor to process as opposed to the graphics card doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
There are some variances where some games will still use graphical power, but not as much CPU grunt at these smaller resolutions, and this is where we can show where CPU limitations lie in terms of gaming.
Disclaimer: We are currently seeing some strange behavior with the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X, where the core parking feature is acting irregularly in gaming. We are essentially seeing instances where cores are being enabled when they shouldn't be, and given it is so random between runs, we are hoping for a fix.
As our disclaimer highlights, we are seeing very odd and sporadic results in our gaming benchmarks, especially at 720p. The biggest issue we see is in Total War Warhammer 3, with this significantly impacting overall performance. In other titles, we see the 9950X beat the 7950X most of the time, but with the infrequent core parking issues we've been experiencing, it really isn't great.
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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?