Some outlets are reporting that Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity is about to receive the much-referred-to patch that allows for improved performance on AMD's Ryzen line of processors. If you remember, rivers of ink flowed regarding AMD's Ryzen performance in gaming, with its monstrous, high-performance 8-core, 16-threaded design sometimes delivering performance below expectations. At the time, AMD clarified how Ryzen is a distinctive CPU architecture, similar yet fundamentally different from Intel's x86 implementation, promising upcoming patches from game developers that would allow Ryzen's architecture to truly deliver.

After Creative Assembly and Oxide Games vouched to improve Ryzen support, Oxide seems to be the first developer with a patch available (from version 25624 to 26118) that improves performance by up to 30%. Reportedly, it took the developers around 400 work-hours to improve the game code in respect to its execution on AMD hardware.The update leads to AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X effectively edging out Intel's 7700K in all scenarios, whose better overall gaming performance is the prevailing argument towards preferring the Intel solution. Even so, it would seem that Intel's 6900K still edges out the Ryzen 7 1800X on the Extreme, 1080p preset. But its 7 FPS lead over the 1800X when paired with 2400 MHz DDR4 memory does come with a cost of more than double the 1800X's.

Performance improvements are greater when the Ryzen processors are paired with higher-performing memory (a nod to the way the CCX's Infinity Fabric inter-CCX communication is dependent on memory throughput for increased performance). It would seem that this update improves Ashes' handling of work threads on the Ryzen CPUs, limiting the amount of workload that hops between CCXs - which incurs in a heavy latency penalty for Ryzen processors. Thus, the load on Infinity Fabric would be alleviated, allowing for its increased throughput to carry only game-critical data between both CCXs, whilst not having to also deal with performance-dropping, inter-CCX tread-hopping.

This is an interesting development, which some probably didn't think would actually happen - bold "future performance improvement" claims have been shouted on their way down from rooftops, after all. And while a single developer (out of two who committed to improving performance) doesn't represent an entire industry, it does give AMD credence in its promises of latent performance on their Ryzen CPUs. Best of all: this happens with no performance penalty for AMD's arch-rival Intel processors. We have to wait and see, but fingers crossed for Creative Assembly's changes (when they come, if they come) to join Oxide Games' own improvements opening up the industry to some relevant, platform-specific improvements (and at the same time, agnostic, as in, with no penalties for Intel).

AMD's partnership with Bethesda is looking more and more interesting by the day.