Should you pair an Nvidia RTX 4090 with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X?

Presently, the Nvidia RTX 4090 and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X are among the most premium hardware available on the market. Only PC builders with deep pockets can afford them as they're generally included in the fastest gaming rigs on the planet.

In addition to launching several capable CPUs, Team Red is well-known for its Radeon lineup of graphics cards. Thus, an important question comes up: can gamers get away with a system that has an Nvidia GPU with a Ryzen CPU?

The answer depends on several factors, including technologies that are exclusive to AMD GPUs and CPUs. Let's find out whether a mix of Team Green and Team Red hardware can effectively work hand in hand.

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The RTX 4090 pairs pretty well with the Ryzen 9 7950X

Previously, Sportskeeda built a gaming PC with the RTX 4090 and the Ryzen 9 7950X CPU. Both of these parts performed incredibly well with a wide variety of video games and synthetic benchmarks.

The on-paper specs of the Ryzen 9 7950X and the RTX 4090 reveal that the components are decked out with the latest innovations in the computing market. The Nvidia GPU is based on the flagship AD102 GPU, packing over 16,000 CUDA cores and 24 GB of GDDR6X memory.

Next up, the Ryzen 9 7950X boasts sixteen cores and 32 threads of Zen 4 monstrosity. This card was the pinnacle of CPU computing from AMD until the arrival of the 7950X3D last week, which claimed the gaming processor crown with its innovative 3D V-Cache technology and a casual $100 price bump.

Listed below is the test setup that we used to record the benchmarks for this test:

Processor	AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
Motherboard	MSI B650 Tomahawk WiFi
Memory	2x 16 GB Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-5200
Cooler	Lian Li Galahad 360 AIO
Storage	1x Crucial MX500 1TB SATA1x Gigabyte Aorus 1TB NVMe Gen4
Graphics card	Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 Founder's Edition
Case	Open-air test bench
Power supply	1x Deepcool DQ750M 750W 80+ Gold1x Cooler Master MWE 550W 80+ Bronze

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Performance of the 4090 and 7950X in video games

In general, the performance of this particular system with 32 GB of DDR5 RAM was impeccable, with detailed results given below. For further clarity, the tests were run at 1440p and 4K resolutions.

The 1440p results with the RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X are clearly as expected. The top-tier GPU delivers framerates that's typical to any other system based on the Nvidia flagship.

The 4K performance results of the system are as follows:

The RTX 4090 delivers very playable framerates across every video game that we test. Interestingly, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X didn't hold the graphics card back in any dimension, especially at high resolutions like 4K, in which the system is mostly GPU-bound.

Check out the ray tracing performance of the system before deciding whether the Ryzen 9 7950X is a good processor for the 4090.

In this test, the RTX 4090 delivers solid performance across a wide range of video games with fairly demanding ray tracing implementation. Looking at this data, gamers with the high-end AMD Ryzen 9 7950X will likely face zero problems if they pair the Nvidia flagship with their systems.

With that being said, it's worth noting that Team Red does have exclusive features like Smart Access Memory (SAM) that allow the CPU and GPU to communicate more effectively, which certainly helps with the overall performance. However, this difference can be ignored given how much faster the 4090 is when compared to the flagship RX 7900 XTX.

In conclusion, gamers can put together a Ryzen 9 7950X and a 4090-powered gaming setup without having to worry about performance issues.