Friday, March 3rd 2017
AMD Responds to Ryzen's Lower Than Expected 1080p Performance
The folks at PC Perspective have shared a statement from AMD in response to their question as to why AMD's Ryzen processors show lower than expected performance at 1080p resolution (despite posting good high-resolution, high-detail frame rates). Essentially, AMD is reinforcing the need for developers to optimize their games' performance to AMD's CPUs (claiming that these have only been properly tuned to Intel's architecture). AMD also puts weight behind the fact they have sent about 300 developer kits already, so that content creators can get accustomed to AMD's Ryzen, and expect this number to increase to about a thousand developers in the 2017 time-frame. AMD is expecting gaming performance to only increase from its launch-day level. Read AMD's statement after the break.
AMD's John Taylor had this to say:
"As we presented at Ryzen Tech Day, we are supporting 300+ developer kits with game development studios to optimize current and future game releases for the all-new Ryzen CPU. We are on track for 1000+ developer systems in 2017. For example, Bethesda at GDC yesterday announced its strategic relationship with AMD to optimize for Ryzen CPUs, primarily through Vulkan low-level API optimizations, for a new generation of games, DLC and VR experiences.
Oxide Games also provided a public statement today on the significant performance uplift observed when optimizing for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU design - optimizations not yet reflected in Ashes of the Singularity benchmarking. Creative Assembly, developers of the Total War series, made a similar statement today related to upcoming Ryzen optimizations.
CPU benchmarking deficits to the competition in certain games at 1080p resolution can be attributed to the development and optimization of the game uniquely to Intel platforms - until now. Even without optimizations in place, Ryzen delivers high, smooth frame rates on all "CPU-bound" games, as well as overall smooth frame rates and great experiences in GPU-bound gaming and VR. With developers taking advantage of Ryzen architecture and the extra cores and threads, we expect benchmarks to only get better, and enable Ryzen excel at next generation gaming experiences as well.
Game performance will be optimized for Ryzen and continue to improve from at-launch frame rate scores."
Two game developers also chimed in.
Oxide Games, creators of the Nitrous game engine that powers Ashes of the Singularity:
"Oxide games is incredibly excited with what we are seeing from the Ryzen CPU. Using our Nitrous game engine, we are working to scale our existing and future game title performance to take full advantage of Ryzen and its 8-core, 16-thread architecture, and the results thus far are impressive. These optimizations are not yet available for Ryzen benchmarking. However, expect updates soon to enhance the performance of games like Ashes of the Singularity on Ryzen CPUs, as well as our future game releases." - Brad Wardell, CEO Stardock and Oxide
And Creative Assembly, the creators of the Total War Series and, more recently, Halo Wars 2:
"Creative Assembly is committed to reviewing and optimizing its games on the all-new Ryzen CPU. While current third-party testing doesn't reflect this yet, our joint optimization program with AMD means that we are looking at options to deliver performance optimization updates in the future to provide better performance on Ryzen CPUs moving forward. "
Source:
PC Perspective
"As we presented at Ryzen Tech Day, we are supporting 300+ developer kits with game development studios to optimize current and future game releases for the all-new Ryzen CPU. We are on track for 1000+ developer systems in 2017. For example, Bethesda at GDC yesterday announced its strategic relationship with AMD to optimize for Ryzen CPUs, primarily through Vulkan low-level API optimizations, for a new generation of games, DLC and VR experiences.
Oxide Games also provided a public statement today on the significant performance uplift observed when optimizing for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU design - optimizations not yet reflected in Ashes of the Singularity benchmarking. Creative Assembly, developers of the Total War series, made a similar statement today related to upcoming Ryzen optimizations.
CPU benchmarking deficits to the competition in certain games at 1080p resolution can be attributed to the development and optimization of the game uniquely to Intel platforms - until now. Even without optimizations in place, Ryzen delivers high, smooth frame rates on all "CPU-bound" games, as well as overall smooth frame rates and great experiences in GPU-bound gaming and VR. With developers taking advantage of Ryzen architecture and the extra cores and threads, we expect benchmarks to only get better, and enable Ryzen excel at next generation gaming experiences as well.
Game performance will be optimized for Ryzen and continue to improve from at-launch frame rate scores."
Two game developers also chimed in.
Oxide Games, creators of the Nitrous game engine that powers Ashes of the Singularity:
"Oxide games is incredibly excited with what we are seeing from the Ryzen CPU. Using our Nitrous game engine, we are working to scale our existing and future game title performance to take full advantage of Ryzen and its 8-core, 16-thread architecture, and the results thus far are impressive. These optimizations are not yet available for Ryzen benchmarking. However, expect updates soon to enhance the performance of games like Ashes of the Singularity on Ryzen CPUs, as well as our future game releases." - Brad Wardell, CEO Stardock and Oxide
And Creative Assembly, the creators of the Total War Series and, more recently, Halo Wars 2:
"Creative Assembly is committed to reviewing and optimizing its games on the all-new Ryzen CPU. While current third-party testing doesn't reflect this yet, our joint optimization program with AMD means that we are looking at options to deliver performance optimization updates in the future to provide better performance on Ryzen CPUs moving forward. "
126 Comments on AMD Responds to Ryzen's Lower Than Expected 1080p Performance
And lets be realistic, most people won't be running GTX 1080Ti or Titan X Pascal with these, meaning framerate differences to Intel will be minimal. And even with these, difference is minimal and most people won't even notice anything different. I've stopped chasing tiny framerate differences long time ago. If CPU or graphic card is about right compared to competition and you like it, just go for it.
something else to note with gaming results is that ryzens tend to lose to lower-clocked broadwell-e as well.
A: Intel specific compilers being used. Game developers can fix this be recompiling and using specific codepaths.
B: Scheduler performance. There's an insane bottleneck going out to fabric between each 4 core complex. The scheduler needs to ensure threads that are using similar data (L2+L3) stay on each core complex.
And fixing whatever bloody memory erata is going on atm wouldn't hurt either.
On the other hand you have PCs which are dominated by 2core and 4cores 48%-44%. You end up with Ports which are done poorly by the same reason you just said (They dump the porting process to a 3rd party). Most publisher do consoles first because those are "assured sales" and PC are an after thought unless its an MMO
intels:
1000$ CPU (not a dime less for such a CPU performance)
300$ (cheapest X99 mobos)
600$ GTX 1080 (because most reviews used only these card for their Ryzen gaming testing)
lets asume that others (case, cooling, ram, psu, fans etc) are equall for both systems.
total = 1900$ (without others - that should be same)
amd:
399$ 1700X
200$ mobo
1300$ for one Titan XP or even two GTX 1080 Ti's
now we have 1900$ vs 1900$ system with similar CPU performance (for rendering and crunching - what is primary objective for CPU's liek these)... and which system will push more frames now? the one with single gtx 1080 or the one with GTX 1080 Ti's x2 or with Titan XP ???
My point is AMD rysen cpus are superior in every sense compared to intel core I7 7700K, and even their HEDT price/performace wise. So what if some game works on amd cpu with 100 fps, and on intel with 110 fps, does that even matter.
5 years i ve been waiting for afordable 8 core cpu i and finally got it to replace my aging 3930K, and im am buying it.
No amount of intel fanboism is going to stop me in that regard.
with 1080ti (and hopefully vega) out soon, titanxp level of performance will be more accesible than ever. that performance level is the same on 1440p as gtx1080 performance is on 1080p.
- Intel's CPUs to this still run some apps faster with HT disabled, so disabling SMT to improve performance is not totally unexpected.
- Ryzen seems to be fine with everything but games. Singling out games as needing optimization is to be taken with a grain of salt, imho.
- In the face of AthlonXP onslaught, intel also claimed that Netburst was faster if you compiled apps specifically for it. And that was true, but we all know how it ended.
I'll take Ryzen at face value and welcome any further improvements. But I will not cont on them.I expect the most "optimizations" we'll see coming out of this are those outlier games that get shittier frame rates with SMT enabled. I expect that to get fixed by developers, but not a whole lot happening beyond that.
With this response they are basically blaming the developers for the "poor" gaming performance. And this is exactly what they did with the FX-8150 and FX-8350. "Performance will increase after developers will optimize their applications for our CPUs" - this is jut a poor excuse. For now, this launch looks similar to Buldozer.
I am not dissapointed by Ryzen, but I won't buy one soon either, no reason to replace my 6700k. It's just a good upgrade for AMD fanboys that still have their FX-83xx CPUs (if you are going to buy a R7 now but a year ago you did not buy an i5 or i7 because it was too expensive, you are clearly a fanboy), or Intel owners that did not upgrade for more than 4 years (considering the same price segment).
The real problem for gamers, is that 4 and 6 core variants won't clock higher.
Eventually they will fix that but this had dropped a bad tomato on Ryzens name already.
Gaming performance is alright (in most tittles) if you forget the fact that this thing costs nearly 500 pounds. Although, even ~200 pound Intel CPU's are much better choice right now for those who mainly game on their PC's.
PS. Revievers, how many of you were asked by AMD to "bench Ryzens in GPU bound games"? ;)
I also don't buy the "devs have to code for our cpu" excuse. AMD might sponsor or give cash to a dev for a particular game to tune it for their game (like AMD did with Hitman), but cpu performance shouldn't ever be reliant on that. IPC is what it is, there's no magic wand in code to fix it. When people want to run an app or game they want to run it knowing roughly what performance they can expect from their cpu, not have to check a list or wonder if the particular app or game happened to be tuned for Ryzen. If that were the case people including me would barely consider Ryzen for 1/2 the current retail price.
AMD would be more credible imo if they admitted that the gaming shortcomings, focus on the crunching/rendering lead, and take the angle that this is the first wave of Ryzen chips and that faster IPC chips will be coming in future Ryzen releases. Although it's not a great message, at least it's less disingenuous than insinuating major performance jumps in cpu benchmarks somehow from a patch. Unless a patch can make the Ryzen oc ceiling go from 3.9/4.0 to 5.0 Ghz I don't see it happening. BTW what happened to "5.0 on air" in their marketing? It turned out to be 5.0 on LN2...
Also an interesting thing, yesterday I've started playing game "Infested Planet" and indie 2D strategy game with massive swarms of aliens and it can utilize up to 4 cores. And I think it actually needs that because it's pushing my 5820K quite hard when massive swarms of aliens flow through map obstacles. It's almost like watching liquid move around. It's quite nice actually. The reason they can't really use more is because not many could utilize that properly.Haven't you learned anything from the RX480 ? The whole reason why AMD focused on that is because MAJORITY of people buy that. You see tons of us having high end cards here, but out there among normies, they mostly buy big ass CPU's with many cores and then they buy graphic card with the most VRAM. Even if it's a model with 16 shader units and barely runs Solitaire at 60fps...
Imho, even 8 threads is more than a regular user needs for a home systems (with exceptions, of course), so the interesting part will only come with Ryzen 3. If those can clock at 4GHz and be had for ~$250 (or less), things will get really interesting.