Wednesday, March 22nd 2017
Simulated AMD Ryzen 5 Series Chips as Fast as Ryzen 7 at Gaming
It's not rocket science to simulate smaller upcoming Ryzen series chips when you have a Ryzen 7 1800X. By disabling two out of its eight cores and adjusting its clock speeds, TechSpot simulated a Ryzen 5 1600X processor. While the Ryzen 5 1600X was a near-perfect simulation by TechSpot, the 1500X isn't entirely accurate. AMD is carving out the 1500X by disabling an entire CCX (quad-core complex), leaving the chip with just 8 MB of L3 cache, disabling four cores on the 1800X still leaves the full 16 MB L3 cache untouched. The Ryzen Master software lets you disable 2, 4, or 6 cores, but not specific cores, so it's entirely possible that disabling 4 cores using Ryzen Master turns off two cores per CCX. Nevertheless, the gaming performance results are highly encouraging.
According to the gaming performance figures for the simulated 1600X six-core and 1500X quad-core Ryzen chips put out by TechSpot, the 1600X barely loses any performance to the 1800X. Today's AAA PC games have little utility with 8 cores and 16 threads, and you'll hardly miss the two disabled cores when gaming on a 1600X powered machine. The simulated 1500X loses a bit more performance, but nothing of the kind between the quad-core Intel Core i7-7700K and the dual-core i3-7350K. When paired with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in "Mafia III," for example, you lose 12.8% performance as you move from the $499 1800X to the $189 1500X (simulated); but you lose 35% performance as you move from the $329 i7-7700K to the $189 i3-7350K. Find more interesting results in the source link below.
Source:
TechSpot
According to the gaming performance figures for the simulated 1600X six-core and 1500X quad-core Ryzen chips put out by TechSpot, the 1600X barely loses any performance to the 1800X. Today's AAA PC games have little utility with 8 cores and 16 threads, and you'll hardly miss the two disabled cores when gaming on a 1600X powered machine. The simulated 1500X loses a bit more performance, but nothing of the kind between the quad-core Intel Core i7-7700K and the dual-core i3-7350K. When paired with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in "Mafia III," for example, you lose 12.8% performance as you move from the $499 1800X to the $189 1500X (simulated); but you lose 35% performance as you move from the $329 i7-7700K to the $189 i3-7350K. Find more interesting results in the source link below.
47 Comments on Simulated AMD Ryzen 5 Series Chips as Fast as Ryzen 7 at Gaming
We already know this is not true...
The 1500X will still have 2 CCX's with 2 cores cut out from each CCX.
The fact that Ryzen is 8 Cores 16 Threads and just one of its CCXs alone is able to push such performance in everything (including gaming) makes me wonder what if some one really started making good use of the other idle 50% of the chip? add to this the fact that Ryzen is 65-95W TDP.
AMD did a really great job with this chip there is no doubt in that.
EDIT:
Also the performance of intel chips with more than 4 core is much worse in gaming than 4 cores i7. All these reviews out there never comparing Ryzen with any of the intel X99 cpus, claiming that they did not do so because of the price. While in fact this is just going to make Ryzen looks like a clear winner overall ( if they did).
The reason why the 1500X has 8MB of L3 is because even though the L3 cache is 8MB + 8MB (2x CCX complexes) each core has dedicated access to 2MB of cache. You physically disable 2 core in each complex, you disable the cache with them. My guess is that the 6 core parts (3 + 3) just has the forth core in each complex disabled electronically, not physically. So in that case they can keep the 2MB of cache of the disabled cores active, leaving it the full 16MB cache.
Win7 with a CCX disabled gives very decent gaming performance. Therefore, R7 can work just fine with a scheduler fix (and be even faster).
That said, if you're looking for a new platform with usb 3.1, m.2, sata III, etc. support it's great news for gamers and competition that a $189 1500X or $249 1600X will serve you well for gaming when paired with a decent video card.
For gaming, right now (before the R5 actual launch), the i5 7600k is a better option, especially when overclocking is taken into account.
The actual disappointment is that Ryzen is not really an upgrade option for gamers using a 4670k or more. But this is understandable, as only a few games actually need more than that.
People bought these WORKSTATION CPUs for gaming because AMD marketed them as gaming CPUs for streaming on twitch or 4K gaming, and sold them at a higher price than an equally performing gaming CPU that would be allot cheaper, the R5 1600x (or even R5 1500x), and it was proven that R7s in 1080p and (in some cases) in 2k, are actually performing marginally worse than a quad core, cheaper, Intel CPU.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing AMD and Ryzen, is that people were expecting some surprising new high improvements everywhere compared with the Intel lineup for less money, including gaming, and this is not the case. I know there are some platform issues (practically all the R7 owners are beta testers) but these issues will be fixed, worst case scenario by launching the next Zen lineup. I am actually impressed by Ryzen, but except video editing/encoding, there is no reason for most home users to buy a 6, 8 or 10 core CPU. Or maybe bragging. I am pretty sure you are wrong, as L3 cache is usually shared between all cores, and for what I know is the same for each Ryzen CCX. Only L1 and L2 cache are per core. You won't partially disable L3 cache by disabling a core.
We have three more weeks until we will know exactly how the R5 will be made and it will perform. I plan on building a HTPC later this year using a Ryzen APU. Hopefully "second half of 2017" means 4th of July :p
I think what I am more curious about is that if the 6 and 4 core variants are just as limited in overclocking (Due to the process used) or if they can at least go a little higher. Might make the 6 cores awesome if they can go even just a couple hundred Mhz faster.
Even single CCX chips will sit on the fabric so it could be memory speeds will affect them too. By how much we'll just have to wait and see.
Bloatware over time alone is inevitable for the non fastidiously vigilant.
As others say here, 4 cores is rapidly becoming the default cpu.
Its in coders interests to run their processes on least used cores. From a laymans view, it doesnt seem so hard for coders to adjust, and if modding code for 4 cores, why not allow for more cores?
The ryzen strikes me as a very resilient CPU - able to absorb more processes over time w/o noticeably affecting its core tasks.