AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, F1 24, Forza Horizon 5.

We've run our CPU benchmarks this time around at 1080p, and 4K, often using DLSS performance mode to shift the burden to processor performance even more heavily - so the 4K results serve as a rough proxy for native gaming in these cases. We're using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card on each of our test beds, armed with DDR5-6000 CL30 memory for the majority of our platforms and DDR4-3600 CL16 for AM4.

This page contains three speed-type games, starting with the classic CPU torture test that is a low-level flight over the Big Apple in Flight Simulator 2020. We then proceed to two racing sims at different points on the arcade/realistic spectrum: F1 24 and Forza Horizon 5.

Flight Simulator 2020

Flight Sim 2020 is brilliant for reviewers because flying low to the ground is incredibly demanding on the CPU, as new and high-quality data is streamed in rapidly. The 9950X3D is again neck-and-neck with the 9800X3D, with its higher core count showing no obvious advantage in this test. The 9800X3D technically leads, with up to a two percent advantage in some runs, but from looking at the bar graphs it's clear that these two are in a league of their own. The margin from the 9950X to 9950X3D is a hefty 35 percent.

F1 24

F1 is one of the few games on our benchmarking list that I play regularly, and for competitive play you really want as many frames per second as you can muster. The RTX 4090 we're using here is combined with the high (but not ultra high) graphics preset, so we have all of the bells and whistles except for RT enabled plus DLSS in performance mode. The 9950X3D holds around a three percent advantage over the 9800X here, though even at 4K we're looking at frame-rates well in excess of 360fps.

Forza Horizon 5

Forza Horizon 5's integrated benchmark stresses both CPU and GPU, so we've opted for DLSS performance mode to keep things as CPU-heavy as possible. This is still the most GPU-bound test in our suite, with the 9950X3D and 9800X3D scoring nearly identically. The margin from 9950X to 9950X3D is the lowest we've seen at three percent.

AMD Ryzen 7 9950X3D analysis

• Introduction, test rig and content creation benchmarks
• Gaming benchmarks: Dragon's Dogma 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, F1 24, Forza Horizon 5 [this page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Counter-Strike 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Crysis 3 Remastered
• Gaming benchmarks: Far Cry 6, Hitman World of Assassination
• Power analysis: Counter-Strike 2, Far Cry 6, Forza Horizon 5
• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D: the Digital Foundry verdict