Ryzen 9 9950X And 9900X Review: AMD’s Flagship Zen 5 Chips Tested
Running AI workloads natively on local hardware, or at the edge instead of in the cloud, is just now emerging into the mainstream on PCs. As a result, reliable, easily repeatable benchmarks for these workloads aren't prolific just yet, though UL has already built a few into its Procyon benchmark suite.
UL Procyon AI Machine Vision Benchmark
Let's take a look at how these processors do with the UL Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark, running solely on the CPU cores using Integer precision. Though the Zen 5-based Ryzen AI 300 features an NPU, Granite Ridge and the Ryzen 9000 series do not, hence all of these tests being run on the CPU cores alone.
This was a somewhat quizzical result. This computer vision benchmark is affected not only by CPU processing throughput, but latency, memory bandwidth and memory capacity as well. Surprisingly, the Ryzen 7 9700X finishes on top, followed by the Ryzen 9 9950x and 9900X. We suspect latency between the dual CCDs on the Ryzen 9 chips negatively impacted performance versus the single, fully-enabled 8-core CCD on the 9700X, but are not certain. We've reached out to UL for some insight.
This was a somewhat quizzical result. This computer vision benchmark is affected not only by CPU processing throughput, but latency, memory bandwidth and memory capacity as well. Surprisingly, the Ryzen 7 9700X finishes on top, followed by the Ryzen 9 9950x and 9900X. We suspect latency between the dual CCDs on the Ryzen 9 chips negatively impacted performance versus the single, fully-enabled 8-core CCD on the 9700X, but are not certain. We've reached out to UL for some insight.
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 9 9950X and 9900X kicked some butt on our custom audio encoding benchmark. AMD's latest enthusiast-class processors took first and second place by some relatively wide margins. The Ryzen 9 9950X actually outpaced the Core i9-14900K by 10 full seconds.
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.
The Blackmagic Speed Test liked the increased cache on the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, at least in regard to the more compressed 12:1 tests with both 4K and 8K footage, where the 7950X3D managed to outpace the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X. Ultimately, the new Ryzen 9s outran their previous-gen counterparts by a few frames per second, but the deltas aren't particularly large and Intel maintains an overall lead in this applications.
The Blackmagic Speed Test liked the increased cache on the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, at least in regard to the more compressed 12:1 tests with both 4K and 8K footage, where the 7950X3D managed to outpace the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X. Ultimately, the new Ryzen 9s outran their previous-gen counterparts by a few frames per second, but the deltas aren't particularly large and Intel maintains an overall lead in this applications.
x265 Video Encoding
The multi-threaded HWBOT x265 Benchmark is based on the open source x265 video encoder that leverages modern CPU instructions to speed 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 only AMD systems in the chart above. Unfortunately, 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 Asus mobo, though, hence all of the Ryzen results above.
As you can see, the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X outperform their previous-gen counterparts by a few percentage points, but even with Zen 5's IPC improvements, there's no making up for additional cores in a video rendering workload like this one.
You'll notice there are only AMD systems in the chart above. Unfortunately, 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 Asus mobo, though, hence all of the Ryzen results above.
As you can see, the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X outperform their previous-gen counterparts by a few percentage points, but even with Zen 5's IPC improvements, there's no making up for additional cores in a video rendering workload like this one.
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 loves these higher-powered Ryzen 9 chips. The Ryzen 9 9950X took the top spot, in both the single and multi-threaded tests and the Ryzen 9 9900X edged out the Core i7-14700K and clearly outran the previous-gen Ryzen 9 7900X.
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 are much more competitive. Here, the 14th Gen Intel Core processors put up the best single-threaded scores, but the Ryzen 9 processors scale better as core counts increase and the Ryzen 9 9950X ends up in the top spot once again. The Ryzen 9 9900X wasn't able to catch the Core i7, however.
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...
All three of the models available in the latest Blender benchmark also ran well on the new Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X. Once again, the Ryzen 9 9950X leads the pack, clearly outpacing the Core i9-14900K and its previous-gen counterparts. The Ryzen 9 9900X outguns the Core i7-14700K again as well, and nearly catches the 14900K.
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.
The 24-core (8P / 16E) Core i9-14900K looks like a mid-range processor relative to the op-end Ryzen processors with the Y-Cruncher benchmark. The Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X finish in first and second yet again, outperforming every other desktop processor we've tested.
The 24-core (8P / 16E) Core i9-14900K looks like a mid-range processor relative to the op-end Ryzen processors with the Y-Cruncher benchmark. The Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X finish in first and second yet again, outperforming every other desktop processor we've tested.
