AMD’s monstrous Ryzen 9 9950X3D is ready to stomp all over Intel

At CES 2025, AMD revealed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D for desktop PCs, which the company is calling both the “world’s best gaming processor” and the “world’s best processor for content creation.”

On paper, the comparison is brutal: AMD says its new chip is 20 percent faster in gaming than Intel’s Arrow Lake flagship, the Core Ultra 285K.

AMD will ship the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and a second Ryzen 9 chip with v-cache, the Ryzen 9900X3D, to PC makers and customers beginning in the first quarter of 2025. Both of AMD’s new desktop chips outperform the existing Ryzen 9800X3D in terms of clock speed and core count — and give buyers additional choices to fill out their gaming systems. Remember, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D obliterated the competition in its review, then immediately sold out.

AMD also said that will bring the X3D architecture to laptops with its “Fire Range” lineup of mobile processors, too. (We’ve covered that in a separate story.)

Here’s what AMD is launching today:

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D: 16 cores/32 threads, 5.7GHz turbo, 144MB cache, 170W TDP.
• AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: 12 cores/24 threads, 5.5GHz turbo, 140MB cache, 120W TDP.

By comparison, AMD launched the Ryzen 7 9800X3D at the end of October, with 8 cores/16 threads, a base clock speed of 4.7GHz (5.2GHz turbo), a TDP of 120W, and 104MB cache, for $479. What AMD is disclosing today lacks a couple of key metrics: the base clock speed and most importantly, the price. Apparently AMD will release both of those details nearer to the actual availability of the two new processors.

AMD hasn’t changed the design of the Core Complex Die from the 7950X3D: each of the chip’s two CCDs has access to the stacked V-Cache, or SRAM, capable of pulling data from the cached memory rather than pulling it from system memory. The other die features unstacked cache, running at a maximum frequency to allow content-creation apps to run as fast as possible. (AMD’s previous family of Ryzen 7000X3D chips stacked the V-Cache on top of the CCD; the Ryzen 9000X3D family places the CCD on top, stacking the V-Cache underneath it, for better heat dissipation and to achieve higher clock speeds.)

From a gaming perspective, AMD is confident that its new Ryzen 9950X3D will handily outperform the Intel Core Ultra 285K.

At 1080p “High” settings, AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D outperforms the 285K by an average of 20 percent, AMD said. That includes games like Black Myth Wukong (a wash) all the way up to Far Cry 6 and Watch Dogs: Legion, where the performance gap widens to over 60 percent. Compared to AMD’s older Ryzen 7950X3D, the 9950X3D is about 8 percent faster, again at 1080p High settings. AMD didn’t use the same group of games for each test, however.

If there has been a flaw in the Ryzen X3D’s armor, though, it’s been in productivity applications. The faster clock speed that AMD has added to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D should help overcome that, AMD believes, and that boost was enabled by the company’s second-gen v-cache technology. In applications ranging from Cinebench 2024 (essentially identical) to Adobe Premiere (a 14 percent advantage to AMD) to Adobe Photoshop (a 47 percent advantage to AMD), AMD believes it holds a 10 percent average performance advantage over Intel’s Core Ultra 285K chip.

Again, a key factor in how these chips will fare will be how AMD eventually prices them. But based upon the existing review of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and how it’s vanished from store shelves, AMD could have another pair of winners in its hands.