AMD's Ryzen has been generally well received as a gaming processor, but it has always had a small Achilles Heel in one area; gaming performance. While some may argue the obviously correct statement that it is "good enough" for many situations, it was obviously not up the level of awesome the rest of the architecture seemed to be at.

It would now appear it may simply be a lack of optimization to blame more than an inherent architectural issue. AMD has seen a major performance patch in one game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, that has netted it around 28% higher average FPS in the medium and high presets, which just so happen to be more CPU bound than higher settings. When asked how these performance improvements were attained, developer Crystal Dynamics had the following to say on the matter:

"Rise of the Tomb Raider splits rendering tasks to run on different threads... By tuning the size of those tasks - breaking some up, allowing multi-core CPUs to contribute in more cases, and combining some others, to reduce overheads in the scheduler - the game can more efficiently exploit extra threads on the host CPU."Very nice. The patch should already be auto applied via Steam. If you want to test against the old build, you can always opt in to an older steam beta (such as v767.2 or earlier) to see the old performance vs the new. This can be done easily from the game properties menu, and a nice "how-to" is shown in the source article.

There were also some major performance improvement patches to certain aspects of other applications such as ZBrush, which are obviously less relevant to gamers but very relevant to content creators. More on that is available in the source article from AMD, below.