The story of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D is refreshingly straightforward: it is as fast as the chart-leading Ryzen 7 9800X3D in games but has double the cores, so it’s significantly better in content creation scenarios like 3D modelling or video transcoding where all available threads are used. If you want a single CPU that can do it all, this is the one to get – even at a hefty £659/$699.
Like the 9800X3D that arrived late in 2024, the 9950X3D has a much larger L3 cache compared to a standard Ryzen 9000 processor, located underneath the CCD rather than above it as we saw on previous Ryzen X3D designs. That means we get that game-changing performance advantage without the hit to temperatures and clock speeds that previously characterised X3D processors versus their vanilla counterparts; the best of both worlds.
To properly get to grips with the level of performance on offer, we’ve run the 9950X3D through our full gamut of 11 game benchmarks at 1080p, 1440p and 4K, including some of the most demanding single-player (Dragon’s Dogma, Starfield, Cyberpunk) and multiplayer (CS2, F1 24) releases.
Before we get into all that though, it’s worth taking a closer look at the specs here to get an idea of the sort of performance we can expect in content creation workloads.
In short, the 9950X3D is extremely promising for content creation, as it has the same rated boost and base clockspeeds and TDP versus the 9950X, with a straight doubling of L3 cache. That ought to mean that it should roughly match the 9950X in standard workloads or even pull beyond it, even if that 3D V-Cache consumes a bit of extra power and produces a bit of extra heat. That’s quite a departure from even the Ryzen 7000 X3D chips, where reduced clockspeeds and higher temperatures resulted in a small net performance regression in all-core workloads.