Currently, AMD has been leading the pack when we talk about the best gaming processors, but it took until CES 2025 to take the victory and extend its lead. During the keynote, AMD showed off the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D, both of which will be available in the first quarter of this year.
Performance doesn’t matter much here, as AMD already holds the top spot among gaming processors with its popular Ryzen 7 9800X3D. However, as shown below, AMD claims an average 8% lead over the previous generation Ryzen 9 7950X3D after testing 40 games. Not surprisingly, graphics-intensive games such as Avatar: Pandora’s Frontier and Black Myth: Wukong No benefit seen, but AMD claims 58% lead in similar games Counter-Strike 2.
AMD
An 8% lead is nice, but AMD has really shown its gaming prowess against Intel. AMD says the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is 20% faster on average at 1080p compared to the Core Ultra 9 285K. There are still those more graphically demanding games, but AMD claims gaming performance improvements of up to 40% Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and 64% Watch Dogs: Legion.
AMD
It’s no surprise that AMD’s new CPUs dominate gaming, considering they feature AMD’s second-generation 3D V-Cache. However, unlike the already-available Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D are targeted at 12-core and 16-core gaming and productivity workloads respectively. Margins are a little tight in this regard.
AMD
AMD says it’s about 10% faster on productivity workloads compared to Intel. The battle is tight in rendering applications like Blender and Cinebench – an area where Intel’s latest CPUs are particularly powerful – but AMD leads by 14 percent in Premiere Pro and 47 percent in Photoshop.
AMD
In a generation-by-generation comparison, AMD claims a 13% lead, albeit with far fewer peaks and troughs than what’s seen in Intel’s comparison. This is not surprising. As you read in our Ryzen 9 9950X review, AMD’s latest Zen 5 desktop CPUs don’t claim to be a huge leap over the previous-generation Zen 4 options, but they are consistently faster in almost every application.
AMD
As always, it’s important to treat these performance figures with a healthy dose of skepticism. I found a sizable performance gap between AMD’s claimed performance and the actual performance of chips like the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X, which AMD eventually addressed with a few updates. Regardless, I won’t pass judgment until I have the chips in hand to test myself.
AMD has yet to provide an exact release date for the new X3D options, but they should be arriving soon. With clear performance comparisons, they are likely to be among the first AMD products to hit shelves in the first quarter of this year.
