Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X Application Benchmarks
The TLDR
The geometric mean of both the most lightly- and heavily-threaded tests in our application suite speak volumes. We're quite accustomed to seeing AMD's chips lead in the multi-threaded rankings while trailing, sometimes by sizeable margins, in the single-threaded performance ranking. That isn't the case anymore, as Zen 3 easily leads both rankings.
Some lightly-threaded workloads, like Cinebench and LAME, respond so well to the Zen 3 architecture that it grants AMD a massive lead in the overall rankings. But as you'll see, while the Zen 3 chips excel tremendously at some applications, they also don't suffer from terrible performance in others as we see with Threadripper.
Rendering Benchmarks on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X
Cinebench has long been AMD's favorite benchmark for a simple reason; the Zen microarchitecture has always performed extremely well in the threaded benchmark. However, AMD has steadily improved its performance in the single-threaded benchmark as well, slowly working its way up the chart.
Apparently those days of small jumps are over, as the Ryzen 9 5950X notches a 20% lead over the 3900XT. That's an incredible gen-on-gen improvement in single-threaded performance. The 5950X also takes a 13% lead over the previous-gen 3950X in the multi-threaded test, which is equally impressive given that both chips have the same 142W power limitation.
Intel's chips take the lead in the single-threaded POV-Ray test, but the remainder of these tests favor the Zen 3 processors by significant margins.
Encoding Benchmarks on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X
Our encoding tests include benchmarks that respond best to single-threaded performance, like the quintessential examples LAME and FLAC, but the SVT-AV1 and SVT-HEVC tests represent a newer class of threaded encoders. Regardless of the type of encoder, though, AMD's Zen 3 chips impress.
Web Browsing on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X
A glance at the bottom of these charts is like a trip down memory lane — that's the traditional position for AMD's chips in web browser benchmarks. These benchmarks are almost exclusively lightly-threaded, so Intel has long held the top of the charts. This series of benchmarks makes a powerful statement about Zen 3's improved single-threaded performance.
Office and Productivity on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X
If you're looking to build a screaming-fast computer, you're probably not doing it to run office applications like Word at breakneck speeds. However, these types of applications are ubiquitous the world over, so snappy performance is important for daily tasks. This is another area that AMD has long offered middling performance, but Zen 3 climbs the ranks in impressive fashion.
Compilation, Compression, AVX Performance on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X
The LLVM compilation benchmark stresses the cores heavily, and here we see that the Ryzen 9 5950X doesn't offer much uplift over the previous-gen Ryzen 9 3950X. The same can be said about the Ryzen 9 5900X compared to its previous-gen counterpart, the Ryzen 9 3900X/T. These muted gains imply that the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
The threaded y-cruncher benchmark again shows limited scaling for the 5950X over the 3950X, and given the memory-heavy nature of this workload, we theorize this boils down to the same limitation on both chips — a dual-channel memory controller that restricts feeding the 16 hungry cores.
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