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: Encoding
One of the interesting elements of modern processors is encoding performance. This covers two main areas: encryption/decryption for secure data transfer and video transcoding from one video format to another.
In the encrypt/decrypt scenario, how data is transferred and by what mechanism is pertinent to on-the-fly encryption of sensitive data—a process that more modern devices are adopting to improve software security.
We've updated our list of encoding benchmarks for our 2024 CPU suite to include some of the most relevant and recent codecs, such as AV1 and HEVC. Not only this, but we have also WebP2 image encoding into the mix to show not only how the latest processors perform with these codecs but also to show discrepancies in performance throughout the different segments.
Note: We know a couple of tests are missing from the encoding section, notably the HEVC, FFmpeg, and WebP2 benchmarks. We are currently working on fixing these issues, and we will publish these results as soon as possible.
In the encoding section of our suite, both the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X perform well across the majority of the tests. While both these chips didn't perform as well in the SVT AV1 encoding benchmark with the fastest preset, they did, however, dominate the mid-speed preset; this preset actually requires more grunt, which the Zen 5 Ryzen 9 chips have in abundance.
In the Dav1d AV1 and the FLAC Audio Encoding (WAV to FLAC) benchmarks, the Intel Core i9-14900K showed some metal by beating all AMD has to offer from Zen 4 and Zen 5. Overall, the Ryzen 9 chips are quite competitive with the other chips on test; nothing won, nothing lost.
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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?