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

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.

Comments

I'm sold for better or for worse.

[TimothyHollins]

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.

Re:I'm sold for better or for worse.

[serviscope_minor]

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

Re:I'm sold for better or for worse.

[jwhyche]

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.

Re:I'm sold for better or for worse.

[jwhyche]

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.

History repeating itself

[leathered]

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.

Re:History repeating itself

[edxwelch]

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.

Re:History repeating itself

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Re:History repeating itself

[Alain Williams]

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.

Re:History repeating itself

[Moheeheeko]

When its half the price of the competition it does.

Re:History repeating itself

[ckatko]

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.

Re:History repeating itself

[jwhyche]

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.

Like others I was sceptical

[GeekWithAKnife]

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!)

Re:Like others I was sceptical

[jwhyche]

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.

Re:Like others I was sceptical

[jwhyche]

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.

Dishonest benchmark is dishonest

[aliquis]

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."

Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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

Re:Dishonest benchmark is dishonest

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Anemic on details?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Breaking news from Intel!

[jwhyche]

Nothing stopping AMD with doing the same thing.

Re:The more cores the better

[jwhyche]

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

Re:Breaking news from Intel!

[jwhyche]

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.