AMD Ryzen 9 9950X vs. Ryzen 9 7950X/7950X3D For Workstation Graphics

While Windows gamers seem mixed over the AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors, for creator, scientific / HPC, code development, and many other technical computing areas I remain very impressed by the Ryzen 9000 (Zen 5) series desktop processors more than one month into constant testing with these Granite Ridge chips. One of the areas I hadn't explored until now but made me curious given the mixed messaging around gaming was how well workstation graphics workloads were performing with the new processors. For this brief weekend article is a look at the workstation graphics performance between the Ryzen 9 9950X and former Ryzen 9 7950X/7950X3D processors.

The workstation graphics performance was one of the few areas I hadn't explored much yet with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors simply for lack of time until now and having so many other CPU/system workloads to focus on. With NVIDIA recently having also sent over a review sample of the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics card was a great time for comparing the Zen 4 and Zen 5 CPU performance for Linux workstation graphics.

Given the mixed (Windows) gaming results and many workstation graphics workloads continuing to depend upon the more CPU/driver-heavy OpenGL API, I was curious about the benefits in going for the Ryzen 9 9950X compared to the prior Ryzen 9 7950X. The benchmarks used for this shorter weekend testing were SPECViewPerf 2020 and KitWare's ParaView.

SPECViewPerf need not any introduction while ParaView for those unfamiliar is a leading open-source, post-processing visualization engine.

I've been benchmarking ParaView for years and is a wonderful open-source application and used across many different fields from engineering and CFD to visualizing sensor data to medical and material sciences.

Note all CPUs were running at stock speeds... The Ryzen 9 9950X at 8.18GHz is a reporting bug by AMD P-State driver on older kernels like Ubuntu 24.04's stock Linux 6.8 build. Ditto on the Ryzen 9 7900 series clock speeds.

This testing is quite simple and is testing the Ryzen 9 7950X versus Ryzen 9 9950X with these workstation graphics workloads while using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and the NVIDIA R560 Linux graphics driver for the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics card being tested. If there is enough reader interest there will be a follow-up article with even more workstation graphics benchmarks and across a wider-range of processors.