Two Flagships, One Demanding Test
Ray tracing at 1440p sits in an awkward middle ground. It demands more from your GPU than 1080p, but it also asks more from your CPU – particularly in titles that lean on software-side BVH traversal, denoising workloads, and thread scheduling. That makes it an interesting stress test for the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, two processors that reach the top of their respective stacks through very different architectural philosophies.
The 9950X3D brings AMD’s 3D V-Cache to a 16-core Zen 5 design, stacking 64MB of additional L3 cache on top of each CCD for a combined 128MB of V-Cache. Intel’s 285K takes the opposite approach – 24 cores across a hybrid P-core and E-core layout, prioritizing raw thread count and high clock speeds over cache density. At 1440p with ray tracing enabled, these differences show up in ways that don’t always follow the expected script.
Test Setup and Methodology
Both CPUs were tested with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 to keep the GPU ceiling as high as possible and expose CPU-side differences more clearly. Memory was set to DDR5-6000 with optimized timings for both platforms – AMD running in EXPO mode, Intel in XMP. Ray tracing settings were kept at the titles’ high or ultra presets, with resolution locked to 2560×1440. Frame generation and upscaling were disabled entirely to avoid masking CPU performance gaps.
The game selection covered a range of ray tracing implementations: Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing disabled but full RT reflections and lighting active, Alan Wake 2 running its full ray tracing pipeline, Control at max RT settings, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered with RT reflections, and Returnal with ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion. These titles represent both GPU-bound and CPU-bound ray tracing scenarios at 1440p.
Game-by-Game Performance Breakdown
In Cyberpunk 2077 with RT Overdrive off but high-tier ray tracing enabled, the 9950X3D and 285K trade blows depending on which metric you prioritize. Average frame rates are within three to four percent of each other, but the 9950X3D pulls ahead noticeably on 1% lows – the V-Cache advantage is doing real work here, keeping lighting and reflection data closer to the execution cores and reducing the stutter spikes that show up during dense urban traversal. This isn’t a dramatic lead, but it’s consistent across multiple runs.
Alan Wake 2 tells a similar story, though the gap compresses. Remedy’s implementation taxes the GPU heavily, and at 1440p the RTX 4090 becomes the dominant constraint more quickly than in other titles. Both CPUs perform within about two percent of each other on averages. The 285K’s E-core cluster handles background streaming tasks efficiently, which contributes to smoother frame pacing in the heavier indoor scenes. It’s a genuine strength of the hybrid architecture that ray tracing workloads happen to expose.
Control is where the 9950X3D builds its clearest lead. The game’s ray tracing implementation is older and runs a significant portion of its workload on the CPU side, particularly for reflection rendering. The V-Cache advantage compounds here – the 9950X3D’s 1% lows run roughly eight to ten percent higher than the 285K’s in the Oldest House’s reflective geometry-heavy environments. For a game released in 2019, it remains a useful stress test precisely because it hasn’t been patched to offload that work more aggressively to the GPU.
Spider-Man Remastered and Returnal are both closer calls. Insomniac’s PC port has historically favored AMD CPUs in rasterization, and that continues here with a modest 9950X3D advantage in average frames. Returnal is essentially a wash – ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion in that title are well-optimized and GPU-bound enough at 1440p that the CPU contribution flattens out the results. Neither processor shows a clear edge across the entire run.
Where the Architecture Differences Actually Matter
The V-Cache advantage for ray tracing isn’t universal – it’s specifically tied to how much ray tracing data stays in the cache hierarchy during a frame. In highly GPU-bound scenarios at 1440p, even a cache-dense CPU like the 9950X3D can’t extract visible gains because the GPU is the bottleneck. But in titles where the CPU is still doing meaningful ray tracing work, or where cache misses translate directly into stutter, the 9950X3D’s extra cache density provides real protection against frame time spikes.
The 285K’s advantage, where it exists, comes from thread throughput. Titles that spawn large numbers of short-lived threads for shader compilation, streaming, or background asset loading benefit from having E-cores available to absorb that work without interrupting the P-cores. Intel’s Thread Director handles this well in 2024 and 2025 titles built with hybrid architectures in mind. In the older or less-optimized titles in this test, that advantage doesn’t materialize as cleanly.
Power, Thermals, and Platform Considerations
Running these CPUs under extended ray tracing loads highlights a meaningful platform difference. The 9950X3D under gaming workloads pulls around 95 to 120W depending on the title, with the 3D V-Cache keeping it from needing to climb to its thermal limits to maintain performance. The 285K at stock settings can push above 200W during sustained multi-threaded loads, though it steps back from that ceiling during gaming. For a pure 1440p ray tracing use case, the 9950X3D’s efficiency advantage is real and adds up over hours of play.
Pricing and availability put both CPUs in a similar bracket at launch, though street pricing shifts over time. The AM5 platform carries a longer official roadmap guarantee from AMD, which matters for buyers planning future CPU upgrades without a motherboard swap. Intel’s LGA1851 socket situation is less settled for future generations. That’s a purchasing consideration beyond benchmark performance, but it’s worth weighing when either CPU is a borderline call on raw numbers.
If your primary workload is 1440p gaming with ray tracing active and you’re choosing between these two, the 9950X3D holds a consistent advantage in frame time stability – not always in raw averages, but in the smoothness that actually determines how the game feels during play. The 285K remains the stronger choice for workstation-adjacent tasks and heavily multi-threaded applications outside of gaming. For dedicated gaming rigs where ray tracing is a regular feature, the V-Cache architecture’s consistency is harder to dismiss, especially in titles like Control that still tax the CPU side of the ray tracing pipeline.
The more open question is how this balance shifts as more titles move toward fully hardware-accelerated ray tracing pipelines that offload BVH traversal and denoising almost entirely to GPU silicon – at that point, the cache density argument weakens, and the 285K’s thread count could start pulling results the other way at resolutions where the GPU isn’t yet the absolute ceiling.
