AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X review: mystifying performance

Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3, Forza Horizon 5.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Aug. 14, 2024

As we mentioned last week with the 9600X and 9700X review, we've adopted a new benchmarking system here at Digital Foundry which uses CapFrameX and bespoke game integrations to streamline the benchmarking process. It's still early days and the system is still under active development, but we've managed to increase both the number of titles (eight) and resolutions (four) tested in time for Ryzen 9900X and 9950X.

Despite the significant capture and backend changes, the results are presented on Eurogamer in a manner you'll be familiar with if you have read our past CPU reviews.

On a desktop-class browser, you get an interactive bar chart showing frame-rate averages and highest/lowest one percent and five percent scores - with the option to click on the chart to swap between frame-rate readouts and percentages. You also get live metrics when the YouTube embed of the test scene is played. On a mobile browser, you'll instead get a simpler package: just a table of frame-rate averages.

Flight Simulator 2020

Microsoft Flight Simulator, Ultra, DLSS Quality

Flight Simulator 2020 is a classic CPU stress test, especially with the new New York discovery flight we're using for testing that sees our plane navigate skyscrapers at extremely close range. We're extremely CPU-limited at all resolutions with our RTX 4090, even with DLSS enabled in its quality mode.

Here's something I didn't expect: the 5800X3D and 7800X3D chips are still among the three fastest CPUs we've tested, outperforming the 9900X and 9950X with the Intel Core i9 14900K sneaking in between the two 3D V-Cache CPUs. (We'd also expect the 7900X3D and 7950X3D to do well here, but the 7900X3D wasn't sampled and the 7950X3D was collected after our review and has yet to be returned.)

We do at least see a nice eight percent performance lead for the 9900X and 9950X at 1080p over their immediate predecessors, putting them in the same ballpark as the 9700X. The 14600K, 14700K and 14900K are faster still, with four, 11 and 16 percent advantages over the 9950X respectively.

Hitman 3

Hitman World of Assassination: DX12, Default, Best Simulation Quality, TAA

Hitman 3, now known as Hitman World of Assassination, is another title that returns from our previous set of benchmarks, and offers a great test of CPU performance with the Dartmoor built-in test and simulation quality set to high and other settings kept on their default values.

This one of several games where the 9900X and 9950X appear to underperform, with average 1080p frame-rates of 175 and 187fps respectively that come in around five percent slower than the 7900X and 7950X. Even without the gen-on-gen performance regression, we're seeing lower performance than the 14600K (195fps), let alone the 14700K (223fps) and 14900K (235fps).

This remained consistent across repeated retests and plenty of troubleshooting steps, from relatively quick chipset driver reinstallations and even a completely fresh install of Windows 11 which took several hours away from our already limited testing time.

Forza Horizon 5

Forza Horizon 5, Extreme, DLSS Quality

Forza Horizon 5 is a pretty GPU-limited game at the extreme settings that we're using here, but using DLSS in performance mode allows us to push the CPU enough to get meaningful differentiation between our choices at every resolution we tested. The new 720p results do come in handy here for showing the differences between CPUs more clearly, though realistically no one is going to play Horizon 5 with such a low internal resolution!

The 9900X and 9950X again are beaten by the 9700X and 9750X, although here at least the deficit is just a couple of percentage points versus the prior gen and the 14900K remains firmly in the rear-view mirror.

Again, I suspect that something weird is going on here given these results, but despite a lot of troubleshooting with AMD and retests into the early hours of the morning, these are the best results we've been able to wring out of the 9900X and 9950X thus far.

Next up: three more games, including a single-core beast (Far Cry 6), a brand-new bespoke benchmark (Cyberpunk 2077) and the return of the OG (Crysis 3 Remastered).