There aren't many reviews out there with Phenom's and gaming performance. However, the 9750/9850/9950 are all comparable to the Intel Q6600 in int/float performance. The 9850 is about the same speed, whereas the 9750 performs a couple percent lower and the 9950 performs a couple percent higher. Due to architectural differences, there are points where AMD has the upper hand, and points where Intel has the upper hand. The Q6600 tends to overclock a bit higher, with quite a few people pushing 3.4-3.6 ghz, while the Phenom series tend to hit their limit at around 3.4-3.5 on good air cooling and a 750 southbridge board (important). The 9xxx series has an appreciable amount more memory bandwidth than Intel's best (until i7 that is), but that is more geared to server and virtualization performance. People could argue days on the merits of each architecture, but for all intents and purposes they have similar performance.
There was a thread not too long ago that compared the performance of AMD and Intel chips, titled "Phenom as good or better than Intel at gaming?" or something on that order, that provided links to some relatively high resolution high-power benchmarks. While a lot of people poo-poo'd the idea, it illustrated the fact that on high resolutions, the game is more GPU bottlenecked than CPU bottlenecked. Really, if you have a decent quad (and 9750-9950 are decent quads), just clock it up to 3.0ghz and you should be able to run whatever high end graphics card combo you want, and it should perform well.
There are exceptions, as always, as not all games are made the same. Microsoft's FSX is far more CPU intensive than it is graphically. For that game, you would want as many cores as you can get... and as fast as you can get them. For that particular game/sim, Intel's core i7 will probably be the best option to have. But, for most games (which are predominantly single or dual threaded), a single dual core is sufficient. A decent quad would allow for a little bit of future-proofing though, as we are starting to see more and more 2-3+ thread games.
The only real variation in CPU speeds comes into play at the minimum FPS level, or at very low resolutions. If your game starts chopping at certain points, but remains smooth in others, and changing resolutions does not help, it's probably either time to overclock your CPU or buy another one (although low RAM resulting in heavy disk usage can do the same thing).
But, to answer your question, yes... the 9950 AMD will most likely be sufficient to run your games at 3.0 ghz.
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