AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Review: An Ideal CPU For PC Gamers
UL Procyon AI Machine Vision Benchmark
Let's take a look at how our assortment of processors do with the UL Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark, running solely on the CPU cores using Integer precision with most of the competitive processors, but also including the recently released Core Ultra 200S' NPU.
Procyon AI offers different frameworks and precision levels on any given hardware. The AMD Ryzen processors don't have any sort of NPU and were configured to use DirectML. The Core Ultra 200S series have the same NPU used in Intel's Meteor Lake mobile processors and support Intel's OneAPI. When using OneAPI, the Core Ultra's CPU performance was all over the map, fluctuating between 150-ish to over 500 points. We're not sure what was happening there just yet, but will continue investigating. When leveraging the NPU on Intel's latest chips, however, performance was consistently high and clearly dominates all of the other desktop processors tested. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D, however, was the fastest AMD CPU overall, thanks in combination to its single CCD design and massive cache.
Procyon AI offers different frameworks and precision levels on any given hardware. The AMD Ryzen processors don't have any sort of NPU and were configured to use DirectML. The Core Ultra 200S series have the same NPU used in Intel's Meteor Lake mobile processors and support Intel's OneAPI. When using OneAPI, the Core Ultra's CPU performance was all over the map, fluctuating between 150-ish to over 500 points. We're not sure what was happening there just yet, but will continue investigating. When leveraging the NPU on Intel's latest chips, however, performance was consistently high and clearly dominates all of the other desktop processors tested. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D, however, was the fastest AMD CPU overall, thanks in combination to its single CCD design and massive cache.
LAME XP Audio Encoding
In our custom LAME XP MP3 encoding test, we convert 16, large uncompressed WAV files to the MP3 format, which is a common use case for many end users, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. The LAME engine is an open-source MP3 audio encoder that is used widely in a multitude of third party applications. For this test, we created 16-copies of our own 223MB WAV file (an 11 minute Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME XP tool. Processing times are recorded below, listed in minutes:seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D lands about in the middle of the pack in our custom LAME MT benchmark, well ahead of the Ryzen 7 9700X and nearly catching the higher core count Core i7-14700K.
Blackmagic RAW Video Encoding Speed
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests full-resolution Blackmagic RAW video decode performance. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both using 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
With the more bandwidth sensitive 3:1 4K and 8K workloads, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs relatively well, and would have marched up the stack a bit if we sorted the graphs differently. Still, performance falls where you would expect for an 8-core / 16-thread Zen 5-based Ryzen processor -- ahead of the 9700X, but behind the 9900X.
With the more bandwidth sensitive 3:1 4K and 8K workloads, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs relatively well, and would have marched up the stack a bit if we sorted the graphs differently. Still, performance falls where you would expect for an 8-core / 16-thread Zen 5-based Ryzen processor -- ahead of the 9700X, but behind the 9900X.
x265 Video Encoding
The multi-threaded HWBOT x265 Benchmark is based on the open source x265 video encoder that leverages modern CPU instructions to accelerate video encoding. We tested the CPUs represented here with the 64-bit encoder using the default 1080p and 4K workloads.
You'll notice there are mostly AMD systems in the chart above. The MSI motherboard we used in our 14th Gen Intel test rig doesn't perform as expected when HPET (the High Precision Event Timer) is enabled, and HPET is required to run this test. HPET works properly on our Socket AM5 motherboards, though, hence all of the Ryzen results above. Once again, we see the Ryzen 7 9800X3D performing well with the more demanding 4K video encoding workload, but it's bunched up with the 9700X and 7700X at 1080p.
You'll notice there are mostly AMD systems in the chart above. The MSI motherboard we used in our 14th Gen Intel test rig doesn't perform as expected when HPET (the High Precision Event Timer) is enabled, and HPET is required to run this test. HPET works properly on our Socket AM5 motherboards, though, hence all of the Ryzen results above. Once again, we see the Ryzen 7 9800X3D performing well with the more demanding 4K video encoding workload, but it's bunched up with the 9700X and 7700X at 1080p.
Cinebench 2024 Rendering Benchmark
Cinebench rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which makes it an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graphs below.
Cinebench 2024 has the Ryzen 7 9800X3D finishing just below the middle of the pack, in-line with its core count. There's just no catching the higher core count processors in a heavily threaded workload like Cinebench. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is great though, and right in the mix with the fastest processors in the chart.
POV-Ray CPU Ray Tracing Benchmark
POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.
Our results with POV-Ray looks very similar to Cinebench. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs as you'd expect an 8-core / 16-thread processor would, and its single-thread performance is right in the mix with the other Zen 5-based chips.
Blender Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation to simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. It has a purpose-built benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model (or models). We used the CPU-focused benchmark with all three models currently available...
These Blender results also have the Ryzen 7 9800X3D finishing just below the middle of the pack, ahead of the recently-released Core Ultra 5 245K, but well behind the higher core count processors.
Y-Cruncher Multi-Threaded Pi Calculator
Y-Cruncher is a multi-core-capable tool that calculates the value of pi to a specified number of digits. In this case, we ran the tool on all threads and had the application calculate the value of pi to 1 billion digits. The values below are the time required to perform the calculation expressed in seconds. As a result, lower values indicate better performance.
In yet another highly threaded workload, but one that's also heavily influenced by cache and memory bandwidth, we once again see the Ryzen 7 9800X3D finishing right were you've expect it relative to the other Zen 5-based Ryzen processor, but punching well above its weight in relation to Intel CPUs. Here, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D beast the Core i9-14900K and nearly catches Intel's current flagship Core Ultra 9 285K.
In yet another highly threaded workload, but one that's also heavily influenced by cache and memory bandwidth, we once again see the Ryzen 7 9800X3D finishing right were you've expect it relative to the other Zen 5-based Ryzen processor, but punching well above its weight in relation to Intel CPUs. Here, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D beast the Core i9-14900K and nearly catches Intel's current flagship Core Ultra 9 285K.
