AMD Ryzen 9 9950X up to 58% Slower than Intel Core i9–14900K & Ryzen 7 9700X in Gaming Workloads

AMD’s Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X processors are about to hit the retail market. The first reviews of the chips are out, and while the content creation performance is decent, the gaming figures aren’t quite up there. The Ryzen 9 CPUs fall short of the Ryzen 7 9700X, often losing to the Core i9–14900K and even the Core i5–14600K in roughly half the titles tested by AnandTech.

Notable examples include Warhammer 3, where the Ryzen 7 9700X is 58% faster than the Ryzen 9 9950X, while the Core i5–14600K holds a 56% lead over the Granite Ridge flagship. Cyberpunk 2077 exhibits similar deficits versus the 14th Gen Intel chips, with the 14900K and 14600K beating the 9950X by 28%.

Returnal treats the Ryzen 9000 CPUs better than most games. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D leads the pack, followed by the Core i9–14900K and the Ryzen 7 9700X. The Ryzen 9 9950X follows the 9700X with a 3% deficit in between.

Company of Heroes is another title where the Core i9–14900K leads the pack with an average of 348 FPS. The Ryzen 7 9700X comes in third with 297 FPS, followed by the Ryzen 7 7700/X and the Ryzen 9 9950X with 266.6 FPS on average.

F1 2023 favors the Ryzen 7 7800X3D over the Core i9–14900K, while the Ryzen 9 9950X ties with the latter. The Ryzen 7 9700X is a smidge slower, but within the margin of error.

The Ryzen 9 9950X is often slower than the Ryzen 7 9700X due to the concept of CCD thread residency. When all the game threads are on the same CCD (Ryzen 7), the inter-core latency is optimal. However, when some of the game data or thread moves to the second CCD (on the Ryzen 9 SKUs), there’s a latency penalty for communicating between the two pools.

AMD plans to increase the TDP of the Ryzen 5 9600X and the Ryzen 7 9700X to 105W (currently 65W) with a future BIOS update. This power hike should put the latter in the same ballpark as the Core i9–14900K or even beat it in some titles.