AMD Ryzen 9 5950X assists both the GeForce RTX 3090 and Radeon RX 6800 XT with incredible results in Geekbench Vulkan benchmark

When you consider the Geekbench 5 Vulkan compute performance benchmark, you think about how well a GPU can score in this particular test. However, Vulkan might have been developed to keep CPU load down compared to other graphics APIs, but it also allows developers the opportunity to take advantage of the multithreaded capabilities of modern processors; so the more threads available, the more work can be distributed efficiently across them. This is where a 16-core, 32-thread beast like the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X comes in, as it seems like the ideal partner for a GPU being tested on the Geekbench 5 Vulkan benchmark.

This is ideally demonstrated by a couple of recently created Geekbench 5 listings for the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 and the soon-to-be-released AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. There was some fuss caused by Tum Apisak’s posting of the latter GPU’s results, which in combination with the Ryzen 9 5950X came up with a score of 167,622 points. To put that in context, it blows past everything provided in the current Vulkan benchmark chart, which has been constructed from the average scores provided by a minimum of five samples. The TITAN V from Nvidia has the highest average Vulkan score on 153,210 points while the powerful GeForce RTX 3090 “only” has an average score of 136,182 points. Taken at face value, it looks like an unbelievable result for the upcoming Navi 21 graphics card.

Fortunately, before the gasps of awe for the Radeon RX 6800 XT reached a crescendo, a later post by the same dedicated data miner helped place things into better perspective. Once again the 32 threads of the Ryzen 9 5950X had been put into good use by assisting a system with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card inside it power to a breath-taking Vulkan compute score of 188,198 points. Considering the basic differences between the RX 6800 XT (4,608 stream processors, 20.74 TFLOPs, 16 GB VRAM,  512 GB/s bandwidth) and the RTX 3090 (10,496 CUDA cores, 35.58 TFLOPs, 24 GB VRAM, 936.2 GB/s bandwidth), you would expect the Nvidia SKU to perform better in this discipline. However, it’s also worth a reminder that the AMD graphics card is priced at US$649 and the Nvidia behemoth costs US$1,499.

There are a couple of takeaways to be had here: Firstly, the new graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia are immense performers, especially the GPU from Team Red as it delivers a comparable performance to a unit that costs more than twice as much. Secondly, if you really want to push a system to the edge in a Vulkan-related benchmark, it certainly doesn’t do any harm to take advantage of the amount of cores and threads that are made available by a processor such as the Zen 3 Ryzen 9 5950X, which yet again proves itself to be a ruler among current desktop chips.

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