AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition Review: Ultimate No-Compromise CPU
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 many mobile processors feature second or third generation NPUs, they just recently arrived for desktop processors. That said, Procyon AI's Computer Vision benchmark runs solely on the CPU cores here.
The overall score in Procyon's Machine Vision benchmark is affected by memory bandwidth, compute performance, and overall latency. As such, the single-CCD Ryzen 9000 series processors perform particularly well in this test. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, however, puts up the best score of the dual-CCD Ryzen 9000 series processors and it significantly outpaces anything from Intel as well.
Geekbench AI Machine Learning Benchmarks
The Geekbench AI benchmark provides a straightforward look at how well a device handles a variety of AI-assisted tasks. This quick and easy test gives you a numerical snapshot of a CPU, GPU, or NPU's ability to power through real-world machine learning workloads, factoring in both speed and accuracy. The higher the score, the better the device's AI chops, whether it's image recognition, object detection, or natural language processing.Results are presented for three levels of numerical precision: single precision or FP32, half precision or FP16, and quantized or INT8. All results that the benchmark provides are geomean scores from multiple runs of each test workload.
We see a similar performance trend to Procyon AI with Geekbench AI's CPU tests. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition outpaces the other dual-CCD Ryzen 9000 series processors when using the ONNX framework and trades blows with the original Ryzen 9 9950X3D when using OpenVINO.
LAME XP Audio Encoding
In our custom LAME XP MP3 encoding test, we convert 24, 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 24-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 9950X3D2 Dual Edition was the fastest of the AMD processors in our custom LAME MT benchmark, but the top-end Intel processors had a slight advantage due to their higher core counts. On the AMD processors, there's some contention on the cores due to their support for SMT, which isn't the case on the Intel processors.
Blackmagic RAW Video Processing 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 RAW Speed Test is affected by both compute resources and memory bandwidth. In the more taxing tests, using less compression, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition takes the overall lead here. When using higher compression (12:1), however, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus takes the lead.
Puget Bench For Creators
PugetBench for creators is an excellent tool for evaluating the performance of a unmber of popular creator-focused applications. We’ve run two tests here, for Photoshop and Davinci Resolve. PugetBench for Photoshop automates a series of real-world tasks inside Adobe Photoshop to evaluate how well a system handles common creator workflows like opening/saving files, applying various filters, and manipulating high-resolution images. PugetBench for DaVinci Resolve runs directly inside Resolve and evaluates performance across a wide range of editing, color, and effects workloads Fusion tests to measure compositing and motion graphics performance and encoding / decoding tests using common codecs.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition put up some strong numbers with the Puget Bench For Creators benchmark, testing both Adobe Photoshop and Davinci Resolve. In both tests, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition took the top spot, outpacing all of the other processors we tested.
Cinebench 2026 Rendering Benchmark
Cinebench 2026 is a 3D 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 a scene 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 2026 adds a new wrinkle to single-core / single-thread testing. Some cores, like those in AMD's Ryzen 9000 series, can process two threads simultaneously, so running only a single thread technically leaves resources unused in one of its cores. Intel's current generation processors, however, can manage only a single thread per core. With that in mind, Cinebench 2026 offers both single-thread and single-core benchmarks, in addition to the multi-threaded test which will utilize all of the cores / threads available in a processor. Since Intel's current processors manage only a single thread per core, their single-core / single-thread results are identical in the graph above.
Once again we see the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition taking the pole position, with the best single-core and multi-threaded results of the bunch.
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.POV-Ray
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition is the fastest AMD desktop processor we've tested in POV-Ray, but Intel's latest processors take the first and second position here.
Corona 10 Render Benchmark
The Corona Benchmark is built on the Corona 10 rendering core and assesses system performance by rendering a scene using Corona 10. It determines the color of each pixel by sending rays into the scene and analyzing the materials, lights and other components and then shows a machine's performance in rays per second (rays/s), where higher values equal better performance.
Score yet another victory for the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition. The Corona 10 Ray Tracing benchmark had the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition outpacing the original Ryzen 9 9950X3D by a little over 6%.
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...
Once again the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition leads the pack in the Blender benchmark, with the highest overall scores with all three of the models tested.
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 Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition scored another first place finish in Y-Cruncher, but it just barely edged out the original Ryzen 9 9950X3D here.
Let's get our game on, next...
