The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Review: AMD's Fastest Gaming Processor
by Gavin Bonshor on February 27, 2023 9:00 AM ESTCPU Benchmark Performance: Rendering And Encoding
Rendering tests, compared to others, are often a little more simple to digest and automate. All the tests put out some sort of score or time, usually in an obtainable way that makes it fairly easy to extract. These tests are some of the most strenuous in our list, due to the highly threaded nature of rendering and ray-tracing, and can draw a lot of power.
If a system is not properly configured to deal with the thermal requirements of the processor, the rendering benchmarks are where it would show most easily as the frequency drops over a sustained period of time. Most benchmarks in this case are re-run several times, and the key to this is having an appropriate idle/wait time between benchmarks to allow for temperatures to normalize from the last test.
One of the interesting elements of modern processors is encoding performance. This covers two main areas: encryption/decryption for secure data transfer, and video transcoding from one video format to another.
In the encrypt/decrypt scenario, how data is transferred and by what mechanism is pertinent to on-the-fly encryption of sensitive data - a process by which more modern devices are leaning to for software security.
We are using DDR5 memory on the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and the other Ryzen 7000 series we've tested. This also includes Intel's 13th and 12th Gen processors. We tested the aforementioned platforms with the following settings:
- DDR5-5600B CL46 - Intel 13th Gen
- DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
- DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 12th Gen
All other CPUs such as Ryzen 5000 and 3000 were tested at the relevant JEDEC settings as per the processor's individual memory support with DDR4.
Rendering
When it comes to rendering, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D doesn't quite hit the compute performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X, but it isn't too far off, given the discrepancies in power usage. It shows that the 7950X3D is more than capable of rendering workloads in an effective manner.
Encoding
Our encoding section of the test suite is similar to other sections, where the 7950X is the faster and more power-hungry chip, which does output more performance. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D does however put in a respectable performance.
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Flunk - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
Looking at all these charts, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that if you're cost-constrained, and the only stressful thing you're doing is gaming that the best strategy is to buy a 7600x and put all of your budget towards your GPU. But if you need to do something that can use a lot of threads (compiling, encoding, etc), the 7950x3d is better, by a small amount, in most games.Hifihedgehog - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
Or the 5800X3D. AMD made it too good. I think 3D Cache will not be worthwhile until 8000 or 9000 series Ryzen when they get the clockspeed throttling resolved.Otritus - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
3D V-Cache will absolutely be worth in Ryzen 7000. Just wait for the 7800X3D that has a homogenous core design. I had suspicions that AMD wouldn’t figure out how to properly optimize for the dual-CCD V-Cache designs, and that seems to have been correct. Hopefully, AMD gets this fixed for Zen 5 because V-Cache is an amazing technology when it works.AvidGamer - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
I fully agree with you there, I too shared the same suspicion and so far it seems to have come true.Another good reason to keep my good and trusted, lovely Intel 13900 KS overclocked to 6.4 GHZ (yes that is for all P cores simultaneously and of course the E-(core)waste is turned off, don't ask, I am running a high flow industrial liquid cooling system that keeps temperatures precisely 2 degrees above the respective dew points; yes it is way larger than a full tower by far and does not rely on those commonly found small crappy radiators and noctua fans as it is used to cool parts of my laboratory equipment, thus I've just added an additional loop (with individual target temperature control) for my processor and graphics card, a trivial matter by the way) and to skip this only half hearted implementation of the AMD 3D-Vcache technology.
IMHO the 7950X3D and 7900X3D have been intentionally crippled for various product placement and business strategy related reasons and I absolutely abhor such practices and condemn them in the strongest way possible. AMD could and should have equipped the 7950X3D with its 3D Vertical Cache technology on both chiplets instead of turning it into an undead zombie like hybrid of neither fish nor fowl. I really despise such artificial hindrances to what could have been a fully functional and well rounded product. In fact I would gladly have paid 1000$ for a hypothetical 7950X2*3D if I would have gotten the chance to buy something like it with more cache on all chiplets, what a shame and a waste first and foremost. Anyway, since my employer foots the bill I've already placed my order (with my employer, I don't know when it gets fulfilled by Intel) for a 4 socket system containing 4 Intel Sapphire Rapids 8490H processors (with all accelerators enabled) that will hopefully help me to get over this enormous disappointment AMD has caused me here. Yeah, if AMD had delivered a solid product in the form of an 7950X2*3D I might have opted for an Epyc based system, but since they decided to basically artificially cripple what could have become a very promising product it is bye bye Epyc 9654 instead and rightly so! Thankfully core density on a per system basis with multiple sockets is higher with intel platinum processors anyway.
Bruzzone - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
I concur 1 x XCCD seems the way to go for AMD optimized titles only and on price performance however Epyc LC or 8490H 4-way or 9654 2P for containerized / virtualized / partitioned are entirely different realms. Have fun with the Intel SR applied science project. mbOtritus - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
Dannyzreviews actually found that e-cores on average increases performance in games. It’s like -5 to 10% performance delta and something like 3% faster on average if I recall correctly. That video came out on YouTube fairly recently so give it a watch.Samus - Tuesday, February 28, 2023 - link
I noticed the same thing while overclocking. Disabling e-cores to get higher clocked p-cores actually hurt overall FPS in Battlefield 2042, a highly CPU-bound game. Unfortunately e-cores do not overclock well, and they are more power hungry than you'd think which limits p-core overclocking potential. Alder Lake is especially dicey with the silicon lottery I hear. I somewhat lucked out but there are tons of people who have identical stepping 12700K's running a full 0.100v higher than mine - the microcode or something in the chip seems to dictate a stock + offset! Mine never exceeds 1.300v stock while many are 1.35+ on the same motherboard, BIOS and settings.Targon - Tuesday, February 28, 2023 - link
Think about the reason why that might happen, you have background tasks, and for some games that use 6-8 cores(there are a few of them around), background programs DO get in the way. So, 8 cores is good for games, but having extra cores will take care of that background stuff. This is why I went with a Ryzen 9 7900X, so I have the extra four cores for anything in the background that might get in the way of games or whatever else I may be doing.octra - Friday, March 10, 2023 - link
But the 7900X has the same 6+6 configuration as the 3D CPU. So those extra cores are not on the same CCD. Any game using more than 6 cores will have use both CCDs at the same time.Dizoja86 - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
Wow, AvidGamer. I've read some pretentious posts on Anandtech in my time, but that was really something else. Almost worthy of its own copypasta.