Ryzen 9 9950X tested in Blender from 60W to 320W PPT. How does performance differ?

We can observe several things here. The fact that the 120W setting of the new Ryzen can be roughly the same, or slightly faster than the Intel Core i9-14900K with 253W MTP, we already mentioned that. However, the tester also tested Ryzen set to 253W PPT, so we can compare the performance at the same consumption (or rather the theoretical maximums, which may not fully correspond to the actual consumption). There, AMD was on average 37% more powerful than Intel, which is a very good result.

If we compare the 230W Ryzen 9 9950X against the older 230W Ryzen 9 7950X, then in the graph we see an average of just under 23% more, which is a very nice number for an intergenerational jump. At the same time, it can also be seen that further increasing the consumption no longer makes any general sense, the power above the 230 W threshold does not increase much anymore.

To make it easier to see, I have prepared two graphs for you, where you can clearly see the dependence of consumption and performance, or vice versa. On this first graph, you can see a fairly linear dependence between approx. 90 and 250 W. If you go, for example, from 230 W to 120 W (61% lower consumption), you will lose 35% of the performance in Blender. However, further reduction of consumption, especially below 90 W, reduces performance faster and it is no longer worthwhile (74% reduction of consumption to 60 W will reduce performance by 57%). We can also see that beyond the 250W limit, the power is basically constant, while the consumption continues to grow.

Here you see it in the opposite direction. First, we see that the consumption (blue line) increases only slowly with the increase in performance, which again suggests that throttling the processor to 60W PPT does not make much sense. At 60 W and 90 W, however, the processor has the same consumption-to-power ratio (approx. 1.4 W per percentage of power). This means that power and consumption decrease at the same rate.

Above 90 W (where there is the best ratio of consumption and performance), the consumption grows a bit faster, but it is still clear that it is not dramatic and it makes sense to decide whether to prioritize performance or consumption. It can also be seen that AMD has set the CPU consumption very close to the last reasonable value before the consumption starts to increase very significantly faster than the performance. At the same time, this does not mean that it is not important to reduce the PPT by something, if one prefers lower consumption and does not mind a slight decrease in performance, because you are getting into the area of ​​a better ratio of these two quantities.