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

Gaming benchmarks: Starfield, Counter-Strike 2

Will Judd avatar
Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry
Published on

This page contains two new benchmarks: Counter-Strike 2 and Starfield. Both are shooters, at the end of the day, but Starfield goes heavy on visuals at the expense of performance and Counter-Strike 2 is the opposite. That means our expectations are quite different, with Counter-Strike 2 demanding consistent performance in the hundreds of frames per second, while Starfield is a 30fps game on console and doesn't get hugely faster even on high-end PC hardware.

Our test system includes an RTX 4090 graphics card with DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM on the latest AMD and Intel platforms, while on the older AM4 platform we're making do with a fast DDR4-3600 CL16 kit.

As before, you have a few options for browsing the results depending on whether you're reading this on a mobile-class browser or a full-fat desktop client. Mobile users get streamlined tables with average frame-rates, while on desktop you get a lot more: live metrics that play out alongside the YouTube embed and a bar chart which you can interact with in various ways. For example, you can hover to see various measurements - average frame-rate, best/worst one percent scores - and you can click to switch between absolute measurements and percentage differences.

Starfield

Starfield: DX12, Ultra, DLSS Performance

Starfield is another title where the 9900X and 9950X underperform, to the tune of about five percent compared to the 7900X and 7950X on what is an identical setup - RTX 4090, DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM and the latest chipset drivers. If you've started at this page, that might be a surprise, but if you've read the other game benchmarks or the title of the review then this is unfortunately par for the course. Meanwhile, the 14900K is around 16 percent faster than the best AMD performer.

Counter-Strike 2

Counter-Strike 2: DX11, High

Counter-Strike 2 is a Ryzen 9000 success story, with appreciable gains over Ryzen 7000 - between five to eight percent - but not as close to the 16 percent we might have hoped for given the single-core advantage that Zen 5 delivers. The Core i9 14900K is the only Intel CPU we've tested in this title, as it is a late-comer to our benchmark suite, but the Intel CPU does hold the lead here.

AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X analysis