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

Gaming benchmarks: Far Cry 6, Cyberpunk 2077, Crysis 3 Remastered.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Aug. 14, 2024

We've run our CPU benchmarks at 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 4K. We'd normally expect differences in CPU performance to be most evident at lower resolutions and steadily less relevant as resolution (and therefore GPU load) increases, but some of our titles showed heavily CPU-bound results even at 4K. Part of this is down to the use of DLSS in supported titles, which uses lower internal resolutions to unlock higher performance - while easing GPU bottlenecking.

It's important to note that while we have added 720p results in this review, 1080p is still our focus as this is the most common resolution actually used by players.

As before, you get a different experience depending on your browser. Mobile-class browsers will see table summaries of the most critical results for each game, while desktop-grade browsers will get a more powerful bar graph - where you can mouse over to reveal more data and click to switch between absolute and percentage values. You can also see our scenes play out in real time by clicking the play button on the YouTube embeds, and you can click the tick boxes on the right to add or remove different CPU and resolution combinations.

Far Cry 6

Far Cry 6: Ultra, TAA

Far Cry 6 is one of those games that's fairly modern but still absolutely lives or dies by single-core performance (and memory bandwidth!). I expected excellent results from the 9900X and 9950X then, but we didn't see the same sterling figures as we got with the 9600X and 9700X.

In fact, frame-rates absolutely plummeted - to just 113fps and 116fps on average, versus the ~140fps results from the smaller Ryzen 9000 processors. These numbers didn't improve with new chipset versions or even on a completely fresh Windows 11 install on a different SSD with the latest BIOS and drivers following the exact steps provided by AMD in its reviewer literature, so I have to consider them representative even if they make little sense.

There's little point in providing extra analysis at this stage, but these figures clearly suggest something is wrong - and hopefully it's something that can be fixed with a driver or BIOS revision.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0, RT Ultra, DLSS Performance

This Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark is one we're quite proud of: a proper bespoke loop through one of the most demanding areas of the game, a spot we identified in some of our earliest testing.

Like Far Cry 6, the 9900X and 9950X way underperform here, with worse performance than the first set of Ryzen 9000 CPUs. It's not unheard of for Cyberpunk to perform better on smaller core counts, but we wouldn't expect to see such significant failings versus the prior generation as well.

Again, we performed these tests multiple times, including with AMD's suggested settings and installation methods, adjusting the SMT option in-game and trying different chipset versions with various cleaning methods in between. Given that our results still fell short with a completely fresh Windows 11 install and the game running completely stock, it's clear that there's something wrong with either our combination of components, AMD's provided software or both.

Crysis 3 Remastered

Crysis 3 Remastered: DX11, Very High, DLSS Performance

We conclude this page with Crysis 3 Remastered. This is another sequence we've used for years for its CPU challenge, and with DLSS set to performance mode it still remains a viable benchmark.

Our results here are relatively normal - we don't see a huge uptick in performance versus 9600X and 9700X, but we're at least in the same ballpark versus Ryzen 7000 which makes a nice change.

Next, we'll finish our benchmarking with two games that actually exhibit performance improvements: Counter-Strike 2 and Starfield.