Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D Productivity Benchmarks — The TLDR
We boil down productivity application performance into two broad categories: single-threaded and multi-threaded. These slides show the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in each of these categories, but be sure to look at the expanded results below for more granular analysis.
Selling a 16-core chip for $699 means it has to deliver the goods in productivity workloads, too. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D lives up to that billing, delivering a solid 20% gain over the prior-gen Ryzen 7 7950X3D. Unlike the trends we saw with the previous-gen models, the 9950X3D matches the vanilla Ryzen 9 9950X in our overall measure of performance in multi-threaded workloads. Notably, there are plenty of examples of the 9950X taking the lead in the heavily threaded workloads in the albums below, but the difference in many of the real-world workloads is surprisingly slim.
The $620 Core Ultra 9 285K is the 9950X3D's real competitor in productivity workloads; it delivers far more performance in threaded workloads than the Core i9-14900K. Regardless, the 9950X3D is 11% faster in threaded workloads than the 285K. However, our overall measurement is heavily influenced by performance in AVX-512 workloads. The 9950X3D has an easy leg up due to its support for AVX-512, while the 285K can't leverage the performance-boosting instructions. The results below also have plenty of examples where the 285K takes the lead over the 9950X3D in threaded workloads.
Our simple PBO overclock yielded a 6% boost for the 9950X3D with no real effort, and we also included those results in the albums below. Remember, the Intel processors would also benefit from overclocking, but this would require far more manual intervention.
What the Intel chips lack in sheer threaded horsepower, they make up for in single-threaded performance. In our cumulative single-thread performance measurement, the Core Ultra 9 285K is 7% faster than the 9950X3D, and the 14900K is 3% faster.
Rendering Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
Intel's Arrow Lake excels in many of the heavily threaded rendering workloads, like its huge leads in POV-Ray, C-Ray, and LuxMark C++. It also delivers leading performance in the single-threaded Cinebench R23 and 2024 benchmarks.
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D also has its advantages, easily leading in Blender, Embree, and both Cinebench multi-core benchmarks, among others. Again, we see strong gains in some workloads from the PBO feature and a surprisingly slim difference between the 9950X and 9950X3D.
Encoding Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
Most encoders tend to be either heavily threaded or almost exclusively single-threaded — and it takes an agile chip to master both disciplines. Handbrake, SVT-HEVC, and SVT-AV1 serve as our threaded encoders, while LAME and FLAC are indicative of how the chips handle lightly-threaded engines.
Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve — AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
The PugetBench for Creators suite is a wonderful tool for benchmarking multiple types of Adobe applications, not to mention DaVinci Resolve. We used the benchmark for Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci workloads.
Web Browser, Office Benchmarks — AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
Compilation, Compression, AVX, Chess Engines, Others — AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
This selection of tests runs the gamut from massively parallel molecular dynamics simulation code in NAMD to compression/decompression performance.
Y-cruncher computes Pi with the AVX instruction set, making for an exceedingly demanding benchmark. This benchmark was recently updated with specific tuning for AMD's AVX-512 implementation. The new code delivers a big boost to Ryzen. Intel's new chips make big strides in this benchmark over the prior generation, but they only support AVX-256 natively, so AMD gets an easy win — the Ryzen 9 chips are incredibly impressive in the BPP benchmark.
Intel has historically performed well in compilation tasks, but the 9950X/3D clawed back the leadership spot in the LLVM benchmark, but by a slim margin. The 285K takes a strong lead in the NAMD simulation code benchmark, while the AMD processors excel at most Chess engine benchmarks and the John the Ripper password cracker.
Geekbench 6, Geekbench AI — AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
The GeekBench AI results in the slide deck above show performance with the workload running on the CPU cores via OpenVino and ONNX. Only two CPUs in this group have in-built NPUs — the Core Ultra 9 285K and Ultra 7 265K — making them the only processors capable of running the workload on a dedicated NPU. Given that the NPU is focused on low-power inference tasks, the results are impressive relative to the performance when the workload executes on the CPU cores.
Tom's Hardware | FP32 | FP16 | Quantized (typ. INT8) |
Core Ultra 9 285K NPU - ONNX | 5038 | 2119 | 7056 |
