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AMD Ryzen Game Patch Optimizations Show Significant Gains On Zen Architecture (hothardware.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the fine-tuned dept.

MojoKid writes: AMD got the attention of PC performance enthusiasts everywhere with the recent launch of its Ryzen 7 series processors. The trio of 8-core chips competitively take on Intel's Core i7 series at the high-end of its product stack. However, with the extra attention AMD garnered, came significant scrutiny as well. With any entirely new platform architecture, there are bound to be a few performance anomalies -- as was the case with the now infamous lower performance "1080p gaming" situation with Ryzen. In a recent status update, AMD noted they were already working with developers to help implement "simple changes" that can help a game engine's understanding of the AMD Zen core topology that would likely provide an additional performance uplift with Ryzen. Today, we have some early proof-positive of that, as Oxide Games, in concert with AMD, released a patch for its game title Ashes Of The Singularity. Ashes has been a "poster child" game engine of sorts for AMD Radeon graphics over the years (especially with respect to DX12) and it was one that ironically showed some of the worst variations in Ryzen CPU performance versus Intel. With this new patch that is now public for the game, however, AMD claims to have regained significant ground in benchmark results at all resolutions. In the 1080p benchmarks with powerful GPUs, a Ryzen 7 1800X shows an approximate 20% performance improvement with the latest version of the Ashes, closing the gap significantly versus Intel. This appears to be at least an early sign that AMD can indeed work with game and other app developers to tune for the Ryzen architecture and wring out additional performance.

121 comments

  1. I'm sold for better or for worse. by TimothyHollins · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's it for me. I was holding out on AMD specifically because I was worried about the gaming performance. I know it's a small leap of faith at this point, but everything is starting to look great with AMD's latest series.

    The earlier benchmarks showed AMD pretty much taking the crown in everything *except* gaming (and I do a fair bit of scientific computing on my home machine), and if these results are possible (1800X performing on par with a 7700K in gaming) then I have no reason to go with Intel.
    My next purchase will be a Ryzen 7 cpu (all of which performed similarly in gaming tests), something I hope will help me, AMD, and every consumer out there due to the competition finally revving up again.

    Now to see if AMD's Vega architecture can compete with nVidia's price-dropped GTX 1080.

    1. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Funny

      Sad to see that the Intel marketing department is such a shadow of its former self.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    2. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Sad to see that the Intel marketing department is such a shadow of its former self.

      Seems they have outsourced to Trump's marketing dept.
      After all, it worked for them, didn't it?

    3. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Truekaiser · · Score: 1

      That is actually an interesting question.
      Intel approached trump for some favors and in return they would build a new fab plant in the united states adding a few thousand jobs.

      I doubt intel will do this, but they could go whine to him about big bad amd costing them and preventing them from making the fab plant.. Interesting times..

    4. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I don't know... that's a fair paraphrasing of AMD's marketing department for a few years too...

    5. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by usuallylost · · Score: 1

      I hope AMD has figured this out. The last few years AMD chips just haven't been all that competitive. I've continued to build the occasional AMD based machine in the hope they wouldn't go under and would turn it around. We really need at least two chip makers making really viable CPUs. The consumer always wins when companies are forced to really compete with each other.

    6. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This only shows that it's possible for a game to optimise for this chip. It doesn't mean game developers will actually put in the effort to do so. Especially on titles that have already launched.

    7. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Zaphon · · Score: 1

      Exactly, so how does this help me? Why should the developer go out of his way to optimize for a specific chip?

    8. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 0, Troll

      Let's look at the hype?

      Intel CPUs have significant per core IPC still. Try %30 per game with massive fps differences on stick settings ram while Intel ones are all over locked and can take on faster ram frequencies giving the +25 fps advantage.

      Worse Windows 10 cripples them! Windows 7 benchmarked on YouTube showed massive performance increases on Nvidia optimized games like Tomb Raider as the CPU scheduling bug is real. AMD is now downplaying it as MS won't fix it due to lack of marketshare.

      Neowin.net reported MS to drop AMD from Hyper-V due to lack of marketshare on the creators update of Windows 10 if you do virtualization. Also VMware ESX fails to post. Ram fails to post that is not under locked on some MSI boards with no updates. MSI only is updating the $399 non carbon model.

      Last your scientific apps may have used Intel compilers that are not IEEE compliant and use x87 fpu instructions to make Intel look good benchmarking. Fortran from Intel is popular with scientific apps which is why I brought it up.

      Intel still won sadly in my opinion. I was rooting for AMD while Ryzen is a massive improvement it still cannot beat them as Intel has the R&D. Let's see Ryzen 2.0? I would hold off for a year or get an Intel still as they are very stable and mature and production ready.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    9. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by The_Dougster · · Score: 1

      We already bought two 1700 systems here.

      --
      Clickety Click ...
    10. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by higuita · · Score: 1

      All this "news" is just FUD, probably paid by intel!
      AMD do have lower market share, but it is not one that you can ignore, if you look to steam, 20% of CPU share is still a huge market

      --
      Higuita
    11. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Funny modded -1 for disagreeing with AMD hype.

      To prove I am not paid by Intel my facts stand by themselves. Intels are much faster in games as IPC still did not catch up. Blender and cinebench perform better simply because of more cores

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    12. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      The hyperlink didn't work for some reason.

      Here is proof https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    13. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      Intels are much faster in games as IPC still did not catch up

      They are not that much faster, unless you count 5 fps out of 130 fps as "much faster." Honestly, I doubt anyone would really notice the difference in Ryzen vs Intel on comparable chips.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    14. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by Burz · · Score: 1

      Sad to see that the Intel marketing department is such a shadow of its former self.

      Its an improvement, even so. They used to tell vendors Intel chips had to be 90-100% of their business, cheat on benchmarks, and rig their compiler to turn off optimizations when AMD was detected.

    15. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      I don't think I would let the gaming performance make me snub AMD at this moment. There is a number of videos on youtube that show some real live benchmarks on AMD vs Intel for these chips.

      In most cases the AMD does lag behind the Intel versions. But it only lags behind by a max of say 5%. To me this is insignificant when you take into account the cost of the chips involved. $599 vs $1000.

      One things that did make me think though was in some of those benchmarks they included a i7-7700K, a $349 chip. This chip was holding its own against the R7-1800x and the i7-6900k. In both the SMP and single threaded categories.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    16. Re:I'm sold for better or for worse. by jon3k · · Score: 1

      Same here. I'm not even much of a gamer but I'll be buying Ryzen 7, motherboard and some ECC ram this weekend.

  2. History repeating itself by leathered · · Score: 2

    The problem for many gamers is that they will have a vast library of games that are not optimized for Ryzen, and never will be.

    It's the same story as the old 3DNow! instructions which vastly improved the gaming performance of the K6-2, a small number of developers released patches to support them. The majority did not.

    --
    For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
    1. Re:History repeating itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not like those games are unplayable. At 1080p most games post at least 100+ fps at the highest settings. From what I've witnessed in Ryzen, RAM speed plays a huge role. Idk if its the fact that there's no "de-facto" standard in DDR4 (like 1600MHz is for DDR3) or what, but all ryzen CPUs that managed to get 3200 MHz RAM modules running are smashing the benchmarks.

    2. Re:History repeating itself by edxwelch · · Score: 2

      There really isn't a problem with gaming performance in the first place. Looking at the benchmarks I see no game tested with Ryzen that doesn't have an acceptable frame rate. Half the games tested were GPU bound anyway. And a few were actually faster on Ryzen.

    3. Re:History repeating itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not to mention that nobody ever plays at 1080p at low or medium settings in a 1080 Ti. At normal resolution and settings, where the bottleneck moves to the GPU Ryzen 7 is fine. And thats were is the crux of the issue: tech sites are insisting that low resolution, low settings is the way to test how future-proof is your CPU, but your future games are likely going to be optimizing for it, so that specific test scenario is generally the worst use case for a new platform.

    4. Re:History repeating itself by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Certain improvements could involve simply compiler updates. Apparently, Ryzen could be better than Intel's Bridgelakes in decoding complex instructions, which is something that contemporary compilers are unlikely to emit due to Intel's dominance.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    5. Re:History repeating itself by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      Some outfits drop support alarmingly quickly; or take a 'if it isn't crashing to desktop more than once an hour, it's totally fine" approach to quality; but it helps that the games most likely to never get Ryzen support are the older ones, which are also the games targeted at the specs of older hardware.

      If it turns out that, even for recent and future releases, only a couple of AMD's best-buddies publishers ever bother then there is a problem. If it's just older games, contemporary PCs are comfortably overpowered, by virtue of being years newer than what those games were developed to run on, so the problem will be largely irrelevant(contemporary Intel CPUs will be even more overpowered for those titles; but once you reach 'overpowered', you are dealing with seriously diminishing returns on performance).

    6. Re:History repeating itself by Alain+Williams · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem for many gamers is that they will have a vast library of games that are not optimized for Ryzen, and never will be.

      Vast libraries take time to accumulate. A game will be designed to perform well on whatever hardware is available at the time that it is released. New hardware is faster than old, so that the game was not optimised for a processor that did not exist when it was released does not matter as long as Ryzen is faster than processors of yesteryear.

    7. Re:History repeating itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That was the case with their older generation chips as well. But "eh, it's only behind by x amount" doesn't sell many chips.

    8. Re:History repeating itself by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      Existing games run well enough.

      What's important is that future games that are more demanding do too. As long as optimization happens going forward, it will be fine.

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
    9. Re:History repeating itself by wbr1 · · Score: 1

      With older games this really wont matter, and even with newer games that go unpatched they still perform enough for clean 60fps gaming with a good GPU. Even if it performs less than an intel CPU with the same GPU, if it is good enough and about .5 the price, what are you bitching about?

      --
      Silence is a state of mime.
    10. Re:History repeating itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And I've had a 4k monitor for a couple of years, so hearing everyone go on and on about 1080p is kind of annoying.
      1080p is (in computer terms) ancient at this point.

    11. Re:History repeating itself by dave562 · · Score: 1

      I was going to make a similar comment, so I will add it in here.

      Just because AMD can work with game developers to optimize code for the CPU does not necessarily mean that the game developers want to, or can even afford to, optimize their code for two different platforms.

      Where do things go from here?

      Do we see a fragmentation in the market, where the chip manufacturers try to woo AAA studios to provide "exclusive optimizations" targeted at a specific platform?

      Do the developers of the game engines themselves (FrostBite, Unreal, Unity, etc.) have to shoulder the burden of writing a "universal" platform that ultimately optimizes for both CPU architectures? Is such a thing even possible? Would it result in in two different installers, each targeted at a different architecture? Sort of like we still have 32 and 64 bit installers for most applications?

      I have been building my own computers since the 1990s, and I have given a couple of AMD chips a chance over the years. My anecdotal experience, sample size of one experience has been that the AMD chips never "feel" as fast. The OS (Windows) is not as responsive. Applications are not as snappy. I am sure that has gotten better and may even be negligible at this point. I hope that is the case. But the impression that I have been left with is that there is an inherent bias towards Intel baked in at this point. Whether it is at the compiler level where the defaults are configured in such a way as to leverage Intel specific instructions, or maybe it's at the application layer where key OS DLLs are similarly optimized for proprietary Intel instruction sets. But there is definitely /something/ going on. The term WinTel was coined for a reason.

    12. Re:History repeating itself by Moheeheeko · · Score: 2

      When its half the price of the competition it does.

    13. Re:History repeating itself by Moheeheeko · · Score: 1

      Do we see a fragmentation in the market, where the chip manufacturers try to woo AAA studios to provide "exclusive optimizations" targeted at a specific platform?

      Its not hard to see, it is already happening on the GPU side.

    14. Re:History repeating itself by ckatko · · Score: 2

      If you need a game optimized for your CPU, why not instead do this thing called "wait two years" and just play it with a faster CPU?

      Slashdot in a nutshell: "Optimization is the root of all evil! BUT I'm PISSED WHEN PEOPLE DON'T DO IT FOR MY CPU."

      I really don't get everyone's strange fascination with needing to play stuff the second it comes out. I've got an AMD FX-8370 and it runs games in 4K just fine. Why the hell would I care whether I get 85 or 110 FPS? Likewise, even if a Ryzen "isn't as fast as an i7" I NEVER WANTED IT TO BE. What I wanted, was a fast, AFFORDABLE processor. I wanted bang for my buck. I've got plenty of other things that cost money every day, why would I spend $1000 on a CPU that'll be in a bargin in a few years.

    15. Re:History repeating itself by dave562 · · Score: 1

      Agreed. On the GPU side, it is slightly more cut and dried. The hardware vendors implement specific effects and then work with the studios who want to leverage those effects. The CPUs are decidedly more complex because at some point the high level object code needs to be broken down into machine code. Without compiler optimizations at the low level, or structural changes at the higher level in terms of functions or what have you, it is difficult to make the most of any CPU architectural enhancements.

    16. Re:History repeating itself by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 1

      It's a little different this time. This is NUMA-aware design. Something that is actually pretty difficult, requiring broad architectural changes that can't simply be bolted onto an app. Most parallel apps don't bother. And similarly, the change isn't "free" like a new instruction: older apps that don't get with the program will run slower and might hit pathological cases. Realistically, NUMA is going to be needed to efficiently scale CPUs beyond 4 cores. Without it, die size increases really fast and it only staves off Amdahl's law by a tiny amount. So, I think it'll get there eventually where it's big enough that apps start to support it and move to a more share-nothing kind of design. But, I very much doubt we'll start seeing that happen any time soon.

    17. Re: History repeating itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For me this "only behind by x frames" will do just fine given the amd cpu price...bangs for the bucks is what will keep the market flowing...gamers that go for maximum bang no matter the bucks can be counted on one hand fingers

    18. Re:History repeating itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you have an old i7 Sandy Bridge processor, the Ryzen should be an overall upgrade, regardless of design choices. It might not be the same story if changing from a newer i7, but Sandy Bridge is a "yesteryear" processor.

    19. Re:History repeating itself by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      I have been building my own computers since the 1990s, and I have given a couple of AMD chips a chance over the years. My anecdotal experience, sample size of one experience has been that the AMD chips never "feel" as fast. The OS (Windows) is not as responsive. Applications are not as snappy

      I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one that noticed this. I just recently built a i7-6700k system to replace my AMD 8150.

      Sure, I'm sure that a lot of that can be explained that I'm moving from a 6 year old design to a modern design. But that doesn't explain why I have the same feeling on my i7-2600K. A chip designed about the same time as the 8150.

      I don't feel that difference on Linux though. My bitch box is a 8350 running Centos 6. We installed a some Xeon blades at work that run the same load of Centos. When I log into those, the AMD feels just as snappy as the Xeons.

      I was thinking of replacing the 8350 with a modern processor this year. The 8350 has been at is post for almost 5 years. In its current role I could easy get 2 or 3 more years out of it.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    20. Re:History repeating itself by dave562 · · Score: 1

      I believe that it does not matter with Linux. I am as certain as I can be based on nothing but observation and a modicum of understanding about operating systems that it has to do with MS DLLs being optimized. It probably has something to do with how they are compiled, and the compiler being designed to leverage optimizations for the Intel architecture. If the optimizations are not there, the code branches to the 'other' execution pipeline for 'generic x86 instruction set' or whatever.

    21. Re:History repeating itself by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      The half-life of a game library is three months, if that, before the games go on the shelf to gather dust forever, or a faster machine comes out that makes performance quibbles silly. I've done my research, I'm sold on Ryzen. I'll be picking up a box as soon as they start moving through the channel, with a modest lag in case of motherboard kinks. This is not primarily for gaming, by the way, this is supposed to be a cost effective work horse. Being a great game machine is just a bonus. Oh, and Vulkan.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    22. Re:History repeating itself by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Just because AMD can work with game developers to optimize code for the CPU does not necessarily mean that the game developers want to, or can even afford to, optimize their code for two different platforms.

      That won't be necessary. For every game house now, Vulkan is a top priority. Invented by AMD, it works best on everything but especially, AMD.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    23. Re:History repeating itself by WorBlux · · Score: 1

      The Memory clock affects the internal CCX performance as well.

    24. Re:History repeating itself by dave562 · · Score: 1

      That's interesting. Do you have anything to backup your assertion that "Vulkan is a top priority [for EVERY game house]." ?

    25. Re:History repeating itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I want 240 FPS Damnit! at 10K Resolution! MAKE IT HAPPEN!

  3. Like others I was sceptical by GeekWithAKnife · · Score: 4, Insightful


    I thought to myself "Can AMD deliver 40% IPC improvement?! - this is going to be a failed Phenom launch isnt it??"

    I was waiting for an Intel beating CPU from AMD since the Athlon Thunderbird C. I never bought Intel because of the underhanded tactics intel used to keep market share and bribe OEMs.

    Not only has AMD delivered with Ryzen it has far exceeded all expectations from IPC to TDP to (optimized) gaming performance and just amazed on multithreaded anything.

    To say that Ryzen and no doubt AMD's upcoming GPU will be a worthy upgrade for my FX-8350/R9 290X is an understatement.

    I was never happier to pay top dollar for a CPU.

    Congratualtions and well done AMD! (and it's about fucking time!)

    --
    A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
    1. Re:Like others I was sceptical by puddingebola · · Score: 1

      Far Side Cartoon; "Not too close Higgins... This geek's got a knife." https://ifunny.co/tags/Higgins...

    2. Re:Like others I was sceptical by Billly+Gates · · Score: 0

      Sorry still behind Intel ... Even with the patches if you read the article. Ryzen is good for video editing and compiling large amounts of code. However, it needs alot of work for Ryzen 2.0 as the infinity fabric and NUMA architecture slow down Windows 10 scheduling threads which spins them around cores causing latency spikes each time in games

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    3. Re:Like others I was sceptical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's better but still not best. Single thread performance is still king for end-user applications. Games most of all.

      No matter how hard you wish, multi-thread programming is difficult and will no time in the near future will lots of slower cores come near the performance of one or two much faster cores for some applications. Games most notably.

      Rending? Sure. Encoding video? Sure. Programming? Sure. Compute tasks? Absolutely? Games? Not at all.

      Is Ryzen a good platform? Yes! Good price, perfectly acceptable game performance, amazing value. Pushing down Intel's prices.

      Is it the best? No. But dollar-for-dollar on mid-range gaming setups it's worth considering.. Unless Intel drops their prices more.

    4. Re:Like others I was sceptical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Christ, are you morons still parroting this? AMD has already put the kibosh on this but yet it still is going around.

      https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/03/13/amd-ryzen-community-update

    5. Re:Like others I was sceptical by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      Oh BS. The benchmarks I have seen show the performance of the Ryzen chips to be close enough to their Intel counterparts. Close enough that the difference won't matter.

      Unless you are so picky that a half a dozen frames actually matter out of a 130 fps.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    6. Re:Like others I was sceptical by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Oh BS. The benchmarks I have seen show the performance of the Ryzen chips to be close enough to their Intel counterparts. Close enough that the difference won't matter.

      Unless you are so picky that a half a dozen frames actually matter out of a 130 fps.

      Then explain this? 40 fps difference between Windows 7 and Windows 10 is NOT SMALL.

      Need more proof?. In Battlefield 1 the same Ryzen 1700 CPU has a 25 FPS drop when going on Windows 10. Put down the AMD fan hat and ballpart game style BIG finger for a minute and look at the evidence? I want AMD to win but right now it has some design problems as the CPU was made during the Windows 7 era so I can't blame this entirely on AMD.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    7. Re:Like others I was sceptical by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      First of all calling me a fanboy is pretty silly. I mean I did just drop over 2000 bones on a intel rig.

      Have you every really looked at the videos? They are around 400 fps. I did some math and the difference at times are between 2% and 5%, with a high as 10%. When you scale these down to real world numbers they are pretty insignificant.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    8. Re:Like others I was sceptical by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      I was never happier to pay top dollar for a CPU.

      I'm doing a Ryzen build next month and even though the 1700 is the best bang for the buck, I'm actually contemplating buying the 1800X just because I want to support AMD. (Note: not a fanboy, current system runs on an i7 860)

      This is the same feeling I had when I bought the Blackberry Priv as soon as I could get my hands on it. Saving physical keyboards on phones was the driving force there.

  4. Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 2, Informative

    To begin with the Ryzen 7 1800X doesn't end up giving the same performance as the i7 5960X even with this update as shown in the article.
    It's completely fair to to deal with them having different spec, 3.0-3.5 GHz vs 3.6-4.1 ghz on the Ryzen 7 1800X processor, but the 5960X is also one generation old, the 6900K would be the current top of the line 8 core one and the 6950X the best one. So if one is going to do a best 8 core vs best 8 core or best consumer line processor vs consumer/enthusiast one this test fail, the prices aren't the same though.

    However what really disturb me from a comparison stand-point is that they gave the i7 5960X 2133 MHz DDR4 vs 2933 MHz DDR4 for the Ryzen 7 1800X, that give the 1800X another opportunity to shine since infinity fabric run at the same clock as RAM but why wasn't the 5960X also given the same speed RAM? It can't run it?

    But it would be more honest with same speed ram and the 6900K or even 6950X it that's what they want to show, or for a similar price point just the 6800K even though that's just a 6 core processor. Which is the most relevant? Up to the reader I guess.

    If we go with OC RAM there would of course exist the opportunity to overclock the 5960X from the 3.0-3.5 GHz range up beyond 4.5 close to 5.0 GHz whereas the Ryzen 7 chip will do 4.0-4.1 GHz on OC. .. and as for gamers what most would rather compare it against is the i7 7700K anyway with just four cores but 4.2-5+ GHz clock-rate and a lower price.

    Anyway, the test manage to show the increase in FPS with the patch and also compare it against whatever other development could had happened to the game (the i7 run the game even slower than before now, the patch affecting it negatively or the game just having become more complex?), so if that was all that would be shown that could had been shown alone but since it's compared to an Intel processor and that Intel processor is a generation old and with slower RAM I don't really feel the test is honest. Also more relevant models would be the i7 7700K, the i7 6800K and the i7 6950X to compare against the "gaming king", the "same price Intel enthusiast processor" and "the best processor of the Intel enthusiast line."

    1. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Will the faster memories for the 6950X erase the $1200 difference in price?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      To begin with the Ryzen 7 1800X doesn't end up giving the same performance as the i7 5960X even with this update as shown in the article.

      More than double the price for a 3.6% performance increase? Face it, Intel loses that comparison.

      The benchmark shows that 1800X is neck-on-neck with a much-higher price bracket, and Intel doesn't have anything cheaper that can even compete.

    3. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      What's worse, even the 12C/24T chip will most likely be cheaper than the Intel one.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    4. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by TimothyHollins · · Score: 1

      I didn't even think of that, since I got the first review from http://www.tomshardware.com/ne... where they use a 6900K. However, since an 1800X costs about half of the 6900K I don't think it's fair to consider them competing in the same segment.

    5. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      why wasn't the 5960X also given the same speed RAM? It can't run it?

      You answered your own question in the form of another question.

      Both systems were given the best RAM they could handle.

    6. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1, Informative

      The reason is the infinity fabric with it's NUMA architecture sucks with Windows 10 and is server oriented.

      What's going on is Windows 10 CPU scheduling and power management LOVES randomly throwing processes and threads around cores during workloads. So imagine your a game busy working on something under Ryzen? You get interrupted and asked to move. Cache is now lost thanks to NUMA and needs to be reloaded from ram and the ram OC is bottlenecked to 2999 MHz. Now you continue. Think that would cause a stutter and fps loss? You bet!

      The Intel shares the same cache and no infinity fabric so no biggie and continues. So a Ryzen is not 8 core. It's really 4 2 cores attached by infinity fabric on a chip.

      MS can fix this with a patch but won't due to the small marketshare

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    7. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by red_dragon · · Score: 1

      "However what really disturb me from a comparison stand-point is that they gave the i7 5960X 2133 MHz DDR4 vs 2933 MHz DDR4 for the Ryzen 7 1800X, that give the 1800X another opportunity to shine since infinity fabric run at the same clock as RAM but why wasn't the 5960X also given the same speed RAM? It can't run it?"

      Per Intel's ARK, the i7 5960X supports up to 2133 MHz DDR4. It has four memory channels, though, giving it more memory bandwidth on paper. The 1800X still makes do with only two memory channels, so the fact that it matches the i7 in speed is quite impressive.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
    8. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Will the faster memories for the 6950X erase the $1200 difference in price?

      I'm just saying it's ~dishonest.
      I'm not saying the 6900K is a better buy than the 1700X.

    9. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      More than double the price for a 3.6% performance increase? Face it, Intel loses that comparison.

      It was never about who win.
      It was about them using slow 2133 MHz memory on generation old Intel platform.

      For games Intel have the i7 7700K which is cheaper and can compete.

      I'd recommend Ryzen 5 1600X and Ryzen 7 1700X over both the i5 7600K and i7 7700K but that doesn't change that they used slow RAM for the Intel CPU.

    10. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      I follow all this stuff very actively and I know about the Pcper speculation and possible indication that's not the case.

      AMD have even gone out themselves and said they don't think there is an issue with the Windows scheduler. But you feel free to keep on believing that. If you want to test against it get the Insider preview / edition and run in game mode which lock the game down to 6 cores instead.

      Of course Microsoft would fix it if they could. There has been speculation a recent update had some quiet / unmentioned Ryzen fixes.

      I could speculate that the Infinity fabric may be wider on the server chips rendering the lack of bandwidth in the consumer 2 CCX version less relevant. It also increase clock with faster RAM so it become less of an issue. It already likely is less on an issue on the Intel chip because it's got quad-channel memory and the fully shared cache (which can also hold more data if one consider the size of the whole space of it.)

    11. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      I go with an expensive one from a brand which have fast memory support for Ryzen:
      https://www.msi.com/Motherboar...
      "DDR4 Steel Armor with Best signal stability , Quad Channel DDR4-3466+(OC)"

      As for the 5960X I don't know.
      I totally doubt the 5960X couldn't use faster RAM than 2133. 2133 MHz is stock though. There's a difference.
      For Broadwell-E the stock is 2400 MHz but as you can see above you can use at-least 3466 MHz DDR4 with it.
      Stock for Ryzen 7 is 2400 MHz but multiple boards support 3200 MHz now and likely more than one person have 3600 MHz running and AMD will release an update for whatever they called their BIOS foundation in early April which will likely help with memory support further.

      I didn't answered it; I made a question because I wasn't 100% sure but I'm as far as sure about it being able to run faster RAM as I can be without knowing .. sorta.

    12. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Per Intel's ARK, the i7 5960X supports up to 2133 MHz DDR4. It has four memory channels, though, giving it more memory bandwidth on paper. The 1800X still makes do with only two memory channels, so the fact that it matches the i7 in speed is quite impressive.

      I'm very aware of both but that doesn't mean the 5960X can't run faster RAM.
      https://www.msi.com/Motherboar...
      "DDR4 Steel Armor with Best signal stability , Quad Channel DDR4-3466+(OC)" .. and the memory channel is a feature of the Intel HEDT platform.

      You can get stable 3200 MHz out of Ryzen 7 at-least and since that motherboard mention 3466+ I assume you can get stable 3466 out of the latest Intel HEDT platform at-least, as for whatever 5960X is somewhat less capable I don't know.

    13. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      There's a difference.

      The key difference being potentially unstable system. The processor and architecture is only capable of the slower speed. Anything else is tantamount to overclocking and kind of defeats the purpose of testing two systems against each other.

    14. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Here is my proof?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      So my guess is AMD is denying it as MS won't change it as AMD owns .2% of the market right now and a major scheduling change will drastic alter power savings on their phones and laptop devices which use the same kernel.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    15. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      Are you talking about the server processor code named Naples? From what ive read its a 32 core, i dont know if it has SMT but i would assume it would, meaning on dual socket motherboard a theoretical 128 threads. and yes im sure it will be cheaper than the 16 core XEON's available.

    16. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      The problem is ddr3 vs ddr4.

      Why cripple your ddr4 system to make it identical to the max ddr3 system?

    17. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      I personally feel that when they had the New Horizon event they should have also Overclocked atleast 10% each system and gave us realworld benchmarks there also. But i can see where most people dont overclock. so they werent worried about that. I guess it was just my personal greed.

    18. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      So youre saying windows sucks.. Got it. Will remember to run my ryzen rig purely on linux when i build it, which was already my plan. but thanks for reassuring it for me.

    19. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      More like Snowy Owl. Naples is four dies with up to 32C, Snowy Owl is two dies with up to 16C. Apparently Snowy Owl is coming out sooner than Naples.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    20. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      Awesome! I must have missed when they announced that. I only knew about Naples. Thanks for the info!

    21. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      The key difference being potentially unstable system. The processor and architecture is only capable of the slower speed. Anything else is tantamount to overclocking and kind of defeats the purpose of testing two systems against each other.

      The Ryzen processor use overclocked memory.
      They could had used 2133 MHz CL15 on both systems.

    22. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      All that video show is that Windows 7 run the game faster for whatever reason.

      If AMD doesn't think there will be a scheduler fix which improves things and that end up being the case then that's how it is and there won't be any changes and fix with improved performance.

    23. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      The problem is ddr3 vs ddr4.

      Why cripple your ddr4 system to make it identical to the max ddr3 system?

      No, both systems use DDR4.

      All X99 systems use DDR4:
      https://ark.intel.com/sv/produ...
      And you can use overclocked RAM on their motherboards too:
      https://www.msi.com/Motherboar...

    24. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      They could have but then they would be artificially handicapping the Ryzen platform which supports out of the box 3400 officially with several modes on the 1800x.

      Overclocking is the process of running something faster than spec, not running something on spec.

    25. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by aliquis · · Score: 1

      They could have but then they would be artificially handicapping the Ryzen platform which supports out of the box 3400 officially with several modes on the 1800x.

      Feel free to go with either the maximum or equal (or even standard), everything else is just weird.
      I don't know if the i7 5960X can do 3400 MHz. Ryzen only really want to do the higher speeds with max 2x8 Samsung B-die.

    26. Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest by thejynxed · · Score: 1

      If Microsoft so chose, they could implement a CPU check and provide an alternate scheduler scheme for systems running a Ryzen CPU. They already do this sort of thing with other AMD vs Intel CPU instruction sets, in fact.

      --
      @Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
  5. Anemic on details? by Theovon · · Score: 1

    It would have been nice if the summary hinted at the nature of those optimizations, unless all they are have to do with the SMT and cache topology.

    1. Re:Anemic on details? by klingens · · Score: 1

      Supposedly it was :
      https://twitter.com/FioraAeter...
      http://x86.renejeschke.de/html...

      Writes to memory which bypass the cache hierarchy totally and are very much processor implementation specific in their speeds.

    2. Re:Anemic on details? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      CFLAGS=-g0 -DTT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER -pipe -O3 -march=native -fweb -funswitch-loops -funroll-all-loops -funit-at-a-time -fsched2-use-traces -fsched2-use-superblocks -fsched-stalled-insns=12 -frename-registers -fprefetch-loop-arrays -fpeel-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -fmerge-all-constants -finline-limit=32768 -finline-functions -ffunction-sections -ffast-math -fdata-sections -fbranch-target-load-optimize2 CXXFLAGS=$CFLAGS

  6. Game optimization vs compiler optimization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If the games can be patched to take advantage of the new features fairly easily, why not release compiler optimization patches?

    1. Re:Game optimization vs compiler optimization by ledow · · Score: 1

      You don't program for a living, do you?

    2. Re:Game optimization vs compiler optimization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't think it's worthwhile for AMD to work with GCC and enable Ryzen-specific native optimizations in generated code?

      Oh, sorry I forgot you troll for a living. Silly me.

    3. Re:Game optimization vs compiler optimization by ledow · · Score: 1

      Cute that you think that it's GCC that they would need to work with for increasing AAA game performance from random third-party developers.

      And cuter that you think that a game patch (which can be an entirely different way of working with the data) is only doing something you could implement as a compiler tweak, or in any way quickly, easily or efficiently enough that all you need do is "recompile" the same code for the new processor.

      And are you then going to have a Ryzen-version and an Intel-version and maintain them both? Or two codepaths for everything in the binaries? And that even a visible percentage of games developers will bother to do that with anything, certainly anything already out, or old?

      By the time this stuff could even be in code that's in your purchased game, it'll be obsoleted by something else from AMD themselves, let alone their competitors.

  7. Breaking news from Intel! by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

    Intel has just come out with a new version of their compiler to build games that will run even faster on Intel chips. AMD chips, well, it's not like we're sabotaging them by making it as slow as possible. I mean, that would be unethical!

    Use our compiler and chips or you're a communist! ;)

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    1. Re:Breaking news from Intel! by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      Nothing stopping AMD with doing the same thing.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    2. Re:Breaking news from Intel! by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

      Nothing stopping AMD with doing the same thing.

      Acting like an unethical amoral sociopath is not something to aspire to, it's something to avoid.

      --
      Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    3. Re:Breaking news from Intel! by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      You're talking about a serial killer. There is nothing amoral, unethical, or sociopathic about designing a complier stream line code for your processor. That is just business.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    4. Re:Breaking news from Intel! by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

      You're talking about a serial killer.

      No, I'm not. There are lots of sociopaths, specifically people with AntiSocial Personality Disorder in business. Wall street is especially fond of them for their sheer ruthlessness and disregard for the wellbeing of the people they are screwing over daily. Sociopaths are just people with significantly reduced capacity for empathy. You specifically could even be one and not know it.

      There is nothing amoral, unethical, or sociopathic about designing a complier stream line code for your processor.

      While it's not wrong to optimize a compiler for your processor, it is quite amoral, unethical and antisocial to intentionally sabotage the competition, which is what they have done for years.

      "That is just business" does not justify reprehensible behavior but it actually is something people with ASPD use to brush off the people who's lives they are destroying.

      --
      Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  8. Sandy Bridge by thegreatbob · · Score: 1

    Power consumption aside, I wonder how long my mildly overclocked Sandy Bridge machine will remain competitive...

    --
    There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
    1. Re:Sandy Bridge by slaker · · Score: 1

      I repurposed six 6C/12T LGA1366 Xeon workstations into mid-range gaming rigs last year. I paired them with GTX1060s and 240GB SSDs. For 1080p gaming, there's really no subjective difference between those machines and a latter-day Kaby Lake i5 PC with the same GPU, at least among the games I tried on them. Even lacking amenities like USB 3 and updated PCI-e slots, those ~6 year old machines could keep up just fine with Mechwarrior Online and X-Com 2. The contemporary i5 is assuredly faster, but I got those complete Xeon systems for about what I paid for the i5 CPU, so I'm not going to complain.

      --
      -- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
    2. Re:Sandy Bridge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Supposing it would take at least 30% performance gains to justify a new CPU purchase... My guess is that it will take at least two more generations. A i7 9600k, probably would finally put my 4.8Ghz i7 Sandy to rest.

    3. Re:Sandy Bridge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I repurposed six 6C/12T LGA1366 Xeon workstations into mid-range gaming rigs last year. I paired them with GTX1060s and 240GB SSDs. For 1080p gaming, there's really no subjective difference between those machines and a latter-day Kaby Lake i5 PC with the same GPU, at least among the games I tried on them. Even lacking amenities like USB 3 and updated PCI-e slots, those ~6 year old machines could keep up just fine with Mechwarrior Online and X-Com 2. The contemporary i5 is assuredly faster, but I got those complete Xeon systems for about what I paid for the i5 CPU, so I'm not going to complain.

      I did something similar - 2009 Mac Pro with two Xeon CPUs (dual hexacore), put in an SSD, got my Nvidia card flashed, and put in 64GB of Ram off of Ebay. Installed Windows via bootcamp, and was able to entirely replace my gaming PC. The performance is indistinguishable for 99% of the games I play. I'm sure there are plenty of games out there where it probably wouldn't be ideal, but I'm having no problem playing the new Mass Effect game at 1080p.

    4. Re:Sandy Bridge by thejynxed · · Score: 1

      And that is because for years now, the Xeons and Core i CPUs have had virtually no difference in them whatsoever other than their bin level and brand name (you can even find this info inside Intel's tech sheets for the Xeons and i series), to the point that I actually prefer the Xeons because they've been running more stable without attaching some monster watercooling system, for a consistently longer period of time. Some subsets of the Core i5 series are in their entirety down-binned Xeons, instead of what people normally assume, that they are down-binned or feature restricted i7s.

      --
      @Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
  9. How can architecture be zen? by XXongo · · Score: 1

    I am mulling over the prospect of zen architecture. How is this done? I'm picturing a flat and roof-less square of sand which, thorough the art of zen consciousness and being in the moment, gives the enlightened zen master all the support needed.

  10. Wait, what? by XXongo · · Score: 1

    Oh, sorry I forgot you troll for a living. Silly me.

    Wait, what? You can make a living by trolling?

    Finally, a career I'm qualified for! Overqualified, even! How do I sign up?

    1. Re:Wait, what? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      You can make a living by trolling? [...] How do I sign up?

      Try going to Russia.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  11. The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

    I am building a new data management system that takes advantage of every core/thread available. Speed is everything! I upgraded my development machine from a i7-3770K to a i7-6800K last fall, but now I wish I had waited and got a Ryzen 1800X instead. The 6-core 6800K gave me about a 50% boost in performance, but I had hoped for more. I am looking to get my hands on an AMD machine to test it out with my program. By taking advantage of all the threads, my system can break up a single database query and run it in parallel to give very fast performance. Queries that take a couple of minutes on PostgreSQL (big relational tables), can run in about 10 seconds using this technique in my system. I am hoping that I can get those down to under 5 seconds using an 1800X.

    1. Re:The more cores the better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      now I wish I had waited and got a Ryzen 1800X instead

      I've got an 1800x. I use in in gentoo and can build firefox in a few minutes. Chromium in not a whole lot more than that.

      I'm not offering to give it to you or anything, just reinforcing that I have one, and you don't.

    2. Re:The more cores the better by dave562 · · Score: 1

      Sounds like an interesting project and challenge to solve. How do you define "big relational tables" in this context? Hundreds of gigabytes? Terabytes?

      Do they fit into RAM or are you having to pull data from the disk subsystem?

    3. Re:The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

      The tables that were taking a couple minutes to query on Postgres had about 20 columns and 5 million rows. Not huge, but respectable. They are still small enough to fit in RAM (32 GB), but I was testing how long it took to query after a cold boot and all data had to be brought in from disk.

    4. Re:The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

      Another nice thing about my system is that each relational table is basically a collection of columnar (key-value) stores. If you have a 100-column table with 10 million rows in it and you perform a query like "Select , , FROM WHERE ilike '%Apple%' OR > 1000;" then I only have to read in 5 of the 100 columns from disk no matter how many rows the query matches. With multi-threading, I can have separate threads checking Column32 and Column48 at the same time.

    5. Re:The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

      Great! The formatting screwed up my select statement. Second attempt without brackets: "Select Column1, Column5, Column19 FROM table WHERE Column32 ilike '%Apple%' OR Column48 > 1000;"

    6. Re:The more cores the better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The tables that were taking a couple minutes to query on Postgres had about 20 columns and 5 million rows.

      Sounds like the table is poorly indexed (is it at all?) for the query - we have tables with 200+ million rows and get similar queries (no ILIKE though) done in less than a second.

      Use EXPLAIN ANALYSE : if it is doing a sequential scan of the table you probably need (additional) indexes.

    7. Re:The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

      How do you even read in a table with 200+ million rows from disk (even with a fast SSD) in less than a second? I tried the queries with all kinds of indexes in Postgres. Indexes work as designed if your query returns a tiny portion of the data. Once you hit something like 5% of the rows, the table scan is often faster. This of course does not even take into consideration all the performance tuning you have to do to create and maintain the indexes. Lots of indexes also slow down inserts and deletes (two copies of the data have to be changed). I would much rather have relational tables that work really fast without needing any indexes at all.

    8. Re:The more cores the better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ....
      If your database is indexed, you don't need to read all 200 million rows. This is really basic stuff.

    9. Re:The more cores the better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How do you even read in a table with 200+ million rows from disk (even with a fast SSD) in less than a second? I tried the queries with all kinds of indexes in Postgres. Indexes work as designed if your query returns a tiny portion of the data. Once you hit something like 5% of the rows, the table scan is often faster. This of course does not even take into consideration all the performance tuning you have to do to create and maintain the indexes. Lots of indexes also slow down inserts and deletes (two copies of the data have to be changed). I would much rather have relational tables that work really fast without needing any indexes at all.

      You don't need to read the entire table from the disk, if the indexes contain enough information to filter the rows - of course you then need to retrieve the rows you were looking for (unless all data is already in the indexes) but that amount is often relatively small.

      Of course if you need to retrieve large amounts of data then you're limited by the throughput of you disks. You can improve the situation in some cases by clustering your data by columns that are likely to be retrieved together to minimize the random access reads.

      At some point a sequential scan of the table is best option - however at that point you're pretty much stuck, since the limiting factor is time for the full table scan from disk - regardless of how you filter later.

    10. Re:The more cores the better by dave562 · · Score: 1

      You don't read it from disk. You put it into memory. As was suggested, you should be investigating indexing strategies. If you need both OLTP and OLAP from the same set of data, you are likely going to have to partition out multiple copies. I do not know of any use cases where organizations are doing both, at large scale, from the same database. You should also setup views if possible so that you can hone in on the specific portions of the table that you need, or the relationships that are relevant to the application.

      FWIW - Where I work, we are dealing with 5TB+ SQL databases running on servers with 1.5TB of RAM. (SQL 2012 R2). Our DBAs are getting decent enough query performance that most of the transactions are completing in under 10 seconds. Even the largest tables have no more than 5 indexes, and they are reorganized nightly. TempDB is 80GB (8 x 10GB) and both data and logs are on EMC XtremIO.

    11. Re:The more cores the better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would much rather have relational tables that work really fast without needing any indexes at all.

      Once the tables grow beyond a trivial size that's impossible and a bad idea on top of that.

      And from what you wrote in your other post ..

      then I only have to read in 5 of the 100 columns from disk no matter how many rows the query matches

      .. it looks a lot like you are trying to re-invent indexes.

      I don't want to discourage you, but I think a properly configured postgresql database with proper indexing will be at least as fast as your solution.

    12. Re:The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

      I take it you don't work with databases a lot. Yes, if your query (SELECT * FROM table WHERE...) only returns something like 100 rows then you only need to read in 100 pages from disk (assuming each row is in a separate page) if you have indexes on all the columns in your where clause (of course, you have to read in the indexes from disk first). If, on the other hand, your WHERE clause returns 10 million rows then you often end up reading in the whole table anyway.

    13. Re:The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

      Thanks for your comments. That is exactly the point of my new system...being able to create fairly large tables; fill them with millions of rows; and then be able to do very fast queries (even ones that return a large percent of the data) on those tables without all the hassle of creating and maintaining indexes. Data read from disk only needs to be the minimal amount needed to satisfy the query. All queries give you the same kinds of performance advantages so you don't have to go and re-design the table just because your query pattern changes.

    14. Re:The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

      It is certainly impossible given the current database designs...which is precisely why I am re-inventing them. At my last company, we spent lots of money to have DBAs 'properly configure and proper index' our databases. Also, whenever the applications decided to query the tables in an entirely different way, the configuration and indexing needed to be changed. My system was still able to outperform those tables without any of the hassles. You might be right that a finely tuned Postgres database can come close to my performance, but as I stated already, I would rather have a system that doesn't need any of that work.

    15. Re:The more cores the better by DidgetMaster · · Score: 1

      Obviously, you have to read it from disk sometime to put it into memory. Now if you have enough memory to hold all your tables, then queries can be very fast (even table scans). But as you stated, you are dealing with databases that are much bigger than the RAM on your servers, even though your company spent a fortune to get 1.5 TB of RAM installed on them. I assume your databases have a bunch of tables that are only queried once in a while so they are kept mostly on disk. Wouldn't it be nice if you could query those tables much faster?

    16. Re:The more cores the better by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      I'm not a database person and I really have no clue what you are talking about so I will just say this. Sweet :)

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
  12. Could've picked a better example by CAIMLAS · · Score: 1

    Of all the games to pick, this is not a good example.

    It has been positively plagued with random stability issues and glitches. 'Tuning' doesn't account for it, as many many people have invested significant time trying to get it to work well.

    If the game itself offered more engaging gameplay or actual technological advances, it'd be one thing. As it stands there are many superior alternatives. It's just a poorly written, bloated game.

    --
    ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  13. This particular speedup by m.dillon · · Score: 1

    Not 100% sure but I think this particular speedup was due to an issue with non-temporal writes to memory. Such instructions are used in heavily optimized game code but not generally used in critical paths elsewhere. They are also known to be highly temperamental instructions even across Intel cpus. The Ryzen box was synchronizing the memory writes to all cores which imploded some of the heavily optimized algorithms.

    So far my tests with a 1700X show Ryzen to be an excellent performance cpu, it goes up well against nearly all of Intel's offerings. It does still run a bit hotter than Intel in my tests but the power consumption is significantly better than past AMD cpus. It's a lot closer to Intel now.

    More importantly, Intel's FAB advantage is dissipating fairly quickly as other fabs catch up. The combination of a modern cpu design and competitive third party fabs puts AMD in a good position to compete from this point forwards.

    As AMD has shown just in the past few days, Ryzen can definitely be competitive and even more so as game devs begin to make Ryzen-optimized builds available.

    -Matt