AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X Review: Retaking The High-End

CPU Benchmark Performance: Rendering

Rendering tests, compared to others, are often a little more simple to digest and automate. All the tests put out some sort of score or time, usually in an obtainable way that makes it fairly easy to extract. These tests are some of the most strenuous in our list, due to the highly threaded nature of rendering and ray-tracing, and can draw a lot of power. If a system is not properly configured to deal with the thermal requirements of the processor, the rendering benchmarks is where it would show most easily as the frequency drops over a sustained period of time. Most benchmarks in this case are re-run several times, and the key to this is having an appropriate idle/wait time between benchmarks to allow for temperatures to normalize from the last test.

We are using DDR5 memory on the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X, as well as Intel's 12th Gen (Alder Lake) processors at the following settings:

• DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
• DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 12th Gen

All other CPUs such as Ryzen 5000 and 3000 were tested at the relevant JEDEC settings as per the processor's individual memory support with DDR4.

Rendering

Digesting the results of our rendering focused tests, and yeah, the Ryzen 9 7950X is an animal when it comes to multi-threaded rendering performance. Starting off with CineBench R23 which is one of the most popular benchmarks users rely on for judging performance, the 7950X is ahead by around 24% in the single-threaded test, and an astonishingly large 49 to 50% quicker in the multi-threaded test. For comparison against Intel, it only beats the Core i9-12900K by 3% in the single-threaded section, but it's over 42% more effective in R23 MT performance which is very impressive. 

It seems that the more cores and threads that are being used, the more effective AMD's Zen 4 is at stretching its legs over Intel's Alder Lake.

Below is some testing from our upcoming CPU 2023 suite update, including an updated version of Blender (v3.3) with multiple tests, as well as a C-Ray benchmark.

Looking at the results of our new rendering tests, we can see that the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X reigns supreme. Even the previous generation Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen3) performs well here, with sixteen full-sized cores, and not hybrid designed architectures like the Core i9-12900K.  

Focusing on the cheaper and more affordable Ryzen 5 7600X, it has similar levels of performance to the Ryzen 7 5800X in rendering; it is worth reminding you that the Ryzen 5 7600X's MSRP is $150 cheaper than what the Ryzen 7 5800X launched for ($299 versus $449). That's a solid gain in value comparing Zen 4 to the previous Zen 3 architectures.