An AMD Ryzen 9 9950X benchmark has just leaked, which suggests the new CPU will be 45% faster than the current AMD flagship, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, in some applications. The benchmark is AIDA64, which is a heavily multi-threaded CPU test, and while it’s not the most representative gauge of gaming performance, it still points to some significant performance gains, especially when you consider that the 9950X and 7950X both have 16 cores.
It’s too early to tell if the 9950X will truly become a new best gaming CPU contender right now, but this benchmark leak certainly suggests the new AMD chip will stand a good chance when it arrives next month.
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is the top-tier option in AMD’s upcoming Zen 5 architecture CPU range, with the official Zen 5 announcement occurring at Computex in June 2024. The new 16-core chip will arrive alongside three other Zen 5 CPUs, the 9900X (12-core), the 9700X (8-core), and the 9600X (6-core).
AMD had previously claimed its new CPUs would offer up to a 16% improvement in instructions per clock (IPC) over their predecessors, which is the amount of work the chip can do at a given clock speed. However, we’d seen in a previous AMD Ryzen 5 9600X benchmark leak that this didn’t seemingly result in a huge uplift in performance for that chip compared to the existing Ryzen 5 7600X. This time, though, with this new 9950X leak, the signs are a lot more positive for AMD’s new chips.
The leak comes via a forum member, igor_kavinski, of tech site Anandtech, who claims they received the benchmark results from a friend who was working with an engineering sample of the new chip. As such, we of course have to take the performance numbers as speculation.
The numbers come from the commonly used AIDA64 CPU benchmark, with the three test results shown being the AES encryption test, the FP32 32-bit floating point test, and the FP64 64-bit floating point test. Along with screenshots of the tests, the results are summarised in comparison with the Ryzen 9 7950X, Intel Core i9 13900K, and the AMD Threadripper 7975WX, as replicated below. The numbers represent the percentage change compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X.
| AIDA64 test | AMD Ryzen 9 7950X | Intel Core i9-13900K | AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7975WX |
| AES | 45% | 55% | 11% |
| FP32 | 39% | 60% | -13% |
| FP64 | 39% | 60% | -16% |
It’s in the encryption test where the 9950X comes out most strongly on top, with it being 45% faster than the 7950X, 55% faster than the Core i9 13900K, and even 11% faster than the 32-core 7975WX. In the FP32 (32-bit floating point) test its advantage against previous AMD chips slips a little, with it having only a 39% advantage over the 7950X and falling behind by 11% against the 7975WX, but it outstrips the 13900K by 60%. It’s a similar story with the FP64 (64-bit floating point) test too.
All that points to this CPU having masses of raw processing power, but exactly how that will translate to gaming performance isn’t certain as yet. That’s because these tests in general aren’t necessarily representative of gaming performance, as they’re hammering all the cores of the CPUs at 100% load in very specific processing scenarios, which simply isn’t how gaming workloads run.
Moreover, AMD has already publicly admitted that its X3D extra cache technology is so advantageous when it comes to gaming performance that the 7800X3D will beat Zen 5 when the first CPUs arrive. Instead, we’ll have to wait until a 9000X3D series of chips arrives for the gaming crown to be taken.
So, in the meantime, we can once again point to the 7800X3D as the chip to buy right now if you want peak gaming performance.