AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review: A 16-Core Zen 2 Powerhouse


AMD Ryzen 9 3950X - Cinebench, POV-Ray, Blender, Fluid Dynamics

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 make is 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
3D Rendering Benchmark

cinebench 3950x

The AMD Ryzen 9 3950X once again took top honors in the Cinebench R20 benchmark, in both the single and multi-threaded tests, when running in its full-power TDP mode at least. Even in lower-power ECO mode, the Ryzen 9 3950X is among the fastest chips here; it trailed only the 18-core Core i9-9980XE in the multi-threaded test.
POV-Ray Performance
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.

 povray 3950x

Our POV-Ray results essentially mirror Cinbench, with the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X sandwiching the Core i9-9980XE at the top of the charts in the multi-threaded test, depending on whether or not it is running in full-power or ECO mode. In the single-threaded test, however, the Ryzen 9 3950X drops down a few rungs and trials the Coffee Lake-based Core i9s.

Blender
3D Rendering Benchmark

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used a CPU-focused BMW model for these tests here...
blender 3950x

Blender tells a similar story as well. Here, the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X once again takes top honors when operating in its full-power TDP mode, besting every other processor we tested, including the 18-core Core i9-9980XE. In the lower-power ECO mode, the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X still performs very well, though it end up trailing the Core i9-9980XE by a couple of seconds.

STARS Euler3d
Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, and cache and memory latency, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache sizes and memory bandwidth affect the score as well...

euler 3950x

Memory and cache bandwidth, latency, and CPU throughput all play a role in this benchmark. As such, the higher-clocked, 18-core Core i9-9980XE, with its quad-channel memory configuration, takes the lead by a wide margin. The AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, however, slots in right behind it, ahead of all of the other processors we tested.

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