AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX vs. Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX Analysis: The battle for the fastest gaming CPU

Of particular interest is the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, which unfortunately was not yet available for testing. Thanks to the 3D V-Cache, it promises above all an increased gaming performance, which we have already seen very clearly with its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. We can only hope that availability will be better this time.

At this point, however, we will refrain from extended consumption measurements and efficiency considerations, as the Nvidia GPU was always running on the external monitor in the engineering sample of the XMG Neo 16, which would naturally increase the power consumption and distort the efficiency results. We will provide these results as soon as possible.

We used Cinebench 2024 and Geekbench 6 for the CPU benchmarks, as these two tests run natively on all platforms and therefore enable a very good performance comparison.

In the single-core tests, the Core Ultra 9 275HX was able to increase its performance by around 6% compared to the Core i9-14900HX. The Ryzen 9 9955HX, on the other hand, was able to increase its performance by around 11% compared to the Ryzen 9 7945HX and has thus caught up with the old Core i9-14900HX.

The two mobile offshoots also lag slightly behind their respective desktop counterparts and, as expected, Apple still has a massive advantage with the M4 generation.

In the Geekbench test, however, the tide turns and the Ryzen 9 9955HX is slightly ahead of the Core Ultra 9 275HX.

In the Cinebench 2024 multi-test, the new Core Ultra 9 275HX performs very well and can outperform the old Core i9-14900HX by a whopping 30%. The Ultra 9 275HX also narrowly beats the Apple M4 Max CPUs — which, however, require significantly less power.

The Ryzen 9 9955HX is around 15 % ahead of its predecessors and around 7 % behind the 275HX. The Geekbench multi-test shows a similar picture, with the two M4 Max SoCs coming out on top in this test.

In the system benchmarks such as PCMark 10, CrossMark, or the 3DMark Physics tests, the AMD CPU almost always has the advantage over the Core Ultra 9 275HX.

However, the other components too naturally have an influence on overall system performance.

Now we come to the gaming performance. We grabbed a number of current titles and tested them, although we did not use upscaling technologies in each case, as we wanted to see the influence of the CPU.

We have deliberately kept the comparison group small here and only compared the two current test subjects and the ROG Strix Scar 17, which was among the fastest gaming laptops of the last generation thanks to the HX3D processor.

In all tests, the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX is ahead of the Core Ultra 9 275HX and the average advantage is 5%. The old Strix Scar with the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D and the RTX 4090 Laptop GPU can hold its own surprisingly well and is even ahead in some titles.

In QHD resolution, the Ryzen 9 9955HX remains ahead of the Core Ultra 9 275HX in every game, with the difference again being around 5%. The old Strix Scar 17 continues to hold its own but has to concede a little more ground to the new 2025 Scar 18.

At 4K resolution, the influence of the processor decreases further and the difference between the AMD and Intel chips becomes smaller, although AMD manages slight leads in every game.

The Strix Scar 17 now falls behind more clearly here, but this is due to the older RTX 4090 Laptop GPU.

We also tested the performance of the two new processors at fixed power limits. Here you can see that the Core Ultra 9 275HX delivers a good performance even at lower TDP values and can outperform the Ryzen 9 9955HX, but only in Cinebench 2024.

In the older Cinebench R23, AMD is ahead up to 100 W but then falls behind quite significantly.

The two new high-end mobile processors from AMD and Intel offer no surprises and are faster than their respective predecessors in both single-core and multi-core tests. Intel also has a slight advantage in the synthetic Cinebench tests, but it cannot replicate this in Geekbench or the system benchmarks.

In gaming, the winner is pretty evident because with the identical Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU (detailed analysis here), the AMD processor comes out slightly faster in all the games we tested.

This increases the preference for the impending Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, which should once again deliver significantly better gaming performance. However, we don't expect to see test devices featuring the HX3D chip for a few weeks, and we can only hope that the availability of the HX3D processor will be better in this generation.