AMD Responds to Ryzen's Lower Than Expected 1080p Performance

[bug]

Was on the hype train but after these reviews I got the 7700k; A little underwhelming

It can be underwhelming if bought into the hype train. Otherwise, it's a good chip. It's just not a win across the board. Right now, both Intel or AMD can be the better choice, but it depends on your typical workload.
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.

 

[bug]

Sure, you can't always use X threads. But the fact is, when majority of systems these days run crappy quad cores, thanks to Intel insisting on such design. With AMD pushing 8 cores and 16 threads so hard, things might and also will change.

Hehe, you must have forgotten the time when we all had quad cores and praying games will use a second core.
Availability of cores is not the issue here, multithreading is actually hard. And by hard, I mean expensive.

 

[yogurt_21]

You know I feel like a "Don't worry we're working on it" would have sufficed. But they as a company have to stop blaming everyone else when this happens.

Instead of blaming devs they could simply say that "All of these titles were developed pre-Ryzen and as such won't be fully optimized for our brand spanking new architecture. We are working with major studios to alleviate the issue and hope to see better performance going forward as new games come out that have been developed with Ryzen in mind and new versions of our chips ship that are more gaming oriented."

That's all they had to say.

Instead they accused gaming devs of developing and optimizing ONLY for Intel, despite the fact that AMD has cpu's out and they are used for gaming. Without optimization and with the massive performance deficit between bulldozer gen4/vishera based chips and the intel offerings would have made gaming improbable on any AMD cpu.

Obviously the game devs had to be doing some optimization for AMD. Throwing them under the bus like that and then saying "but we're counting on them to fix it" isn't a great idea. "Let's piss off the people we need to fix the issue" is a great way to ensure Ryzen's 1080p performance remains lackluster.

Had they gone with my quote from above it would go over better and its more honest.

 

[RejZoR]

It's not. But it is, if implementing it means you'll only be covering 10% of the units out there. The fact we've been stuck on quad cores for so long, developers got kinda lazy in their comfort zone of 4 threads in mind. No one even bothered to use more threads to crunch physics and make CPU physics more immersive. Because up till now, those few of us with 6 and 8 cores just weren't worth the effort. But now with 8 core 16 threads CPU's going for only $499, it will change. Not over night, but certainly at accelerated pace.

 

[bug]

It's not. But it is, if implementing it means you'll only be covering 10% of the units out there. The fact we've been stuck on quad cores for so long, developers got kinda lazy in their comfort zone of 4 threads in mind. No one even bothered to use more threads to crunch physics and make CPU physics more immersive. Because up till now, those few of us with 6 and 8 cores just weren't worth the effort. But now with 8 core 16 threads CPU's going for only $499, it will change. Not over night, but certainly at accelerated pace.

Have you ever developed/delivered a piece of multithreaded code? It's hard to write, hard to test properly and even harder to maintain. The number of threads hardly matters.

 

[londiste]

Because that's what most gamers have. You see here that people have GTX 1080 en mass, but reality is, most gamers have mid-high tier cards. It's why AMD focused on RX480 only the last round and it worked out great for them. Because that's what majority buys.

agreed, but at the same time, the same minority who has 1080s is the same crowd who buys 300+€ cpu-s.

 

[newtekie1]

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.

I think it will be a mix. I largely agree with you though. Since the 1060/480 segment is the most popular, most will be pairing these processors with that level of card, and probably a lot of 1070s too.

However, I'll say that whatever you pair it with the Ryzen processors aren't that bad at gaming, even if you do pair it with a GTX1080Ti or a Titan XP. And I'm sure there will be a good number of people buying GTX1080Ti cards and pairing them with Ryzen processors. The reason being that no one buying those cards is going to be playing at 1080p. And that is where people are going wrong. They are focusing too much on the 1080p benchmarks. The 1080p benchmarks have a place, they are done for a reason, I know that. They use the beefiest card/s possible, at basically the lowest resolution people are playing at, to limit the GPU bottleneck as much as possible and try to move the bottleneck to the CPU. The problem is that essentially becomes a synthetic benchmark to me. Because that is a scenario that will almost never happen.

It's not. But it is, if implementing it means you'll only be covering 10% of the units out there. The fact we've been stuck on quad cores for so long, developers got kinda lazy in their comfort zone of 4 threads in mind. No one even bothered to use more threads to crunch physics and make CPU physics more immersive. Because up till now, those few of us with 6 and 8 cores just weren't worth the effort. But now with 8 core 16 threads CPU's going for only $499, it will change. Not over night, but certainly at accelerated pace.

Actually, $329. And it isn't that I think they got lazy. I think it is the same reasoning behind why Ryzen 1080 benchmarks aren't that reasonable. They are programming to the majority. The majority have 4-core or less processors. So that is what they program for.

Ryzen is going to force Intel to lower prices on their 6 and 8 core chips. So it isn't just that the AMD chips are reasonable now, it will make Intel's reasonable, and overall a lot more peoplegamers are going to be buying them.

 

[Slizzo]

amd Ryzen has better gaming performance than intel (yes I said it - read few more lines before respond...)... lest say you wanna i7-6900K type of CPU performance (obviously your primary need is rendering and crunching, not gaming)... and then you want to game with same system... lets put that in numbers:
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 ???

Dumbass snobs got rekt by @techy1 comment

Here's my build from November of last year:

Intel:
6800K (yeah, I know, not what you posted exactly) - $380
MSI X99A Raider - $159
GTX 1080 (I already had this from launch day, with my previous setup.) - $650

Total = $1189

Before chucking out numbers, maybe want to check your facts. The motherboard alone you're just crazy pants. Now I would have liked to have waited for Ryzen launch, but after seeing reviews of day one, I'm OK with having my machine for 6-9 months before the bugs and issues get ironed out with the Ryzen platform.

 

[Dave65]

Dunno why some are bashing AMD, I think they "FINALLY" got something to compete with Intel and at a decent price..

 

[EarthDog]

amd Ryzen has better gaming performance than intel (yes I said it - read few more lines before respond...)... lest say you wanna i7-6900K type of CPU performance (obviously your primary need is rendering and crunching, not gaming)... and then you want to game with same system... lets put that in numbers:
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 ???

What you actually meant to say is that, price to performance, AMD is better... indeed. Because if you strapped the same hardware to the AMD CPU (as best you could read: GPU and memory), it performs LESS in some titles with the same GPU compared to intel as we have seen in many reviews.

Remember, boost is only 2c/4t.

 

[unsmart]

Dunno why some are bashing AMD, I think they "FINALLY" got something to compete with Intel and at a decent price..

Because they pissed on there own parade with a not ready for prime time platform. Really sending reviewers systems that hardly work is just screwing themselfs.

 

[GoldenX]

You can't call gaming only results "hardly working". That's like saying a Xeon is a bad CPU for being bad at gaming.

 

[Foobario]

Was on the hype train but after these reviews I got the 7700k; A little underwhelming

If your Intel option was the 7700k, it seems you weren't in the market for any of the AMD CPUs released thus far. 8 core/16 thread CPUs are targeted at individuals that work in a software environment that has embraced multi core performance.

No matter what the internet hype was in regard to gaming, 8 core CPUs are not targeted at gaming in the current single core environment.

Having said that, it is obvious that AMD has some work to do to create compilers to bring some games up to the natural performance levels that one would expect from chips that have similar IPC to Intel's eight core chips.

 

[Mescalamba]

Only problem is that nobody will optimize current games for AMD.

Apart that tiny fact that making game from dual core to quad, hexa or octa friendly isnt "just like that". In many cases (FPS mostly) its near impossible. If we dont mind that even if it was possible you dont have that much to occupy those extra cores with. Sure you can probably have FPS that uses six cores. Only problem will be that one core will go to 100% load and rest up to whole freaking 5%.

Low-lvl approach (Vulkan, Mantle however is that called now) wont help, power aint there. By that I mean single-core computing power. And if its not there, you wont get more.

But IMHO these CPUs are great for that price and do we all really need top CPUs for gaming? Not rly.. Lately I could actually use 6 cores, so Im glad they made them.

Ryzen today is "pretty good CPU for pretty good price". If you want the best, sure buy Intel. But thing is, very few do need the best. There is Ferrari, Bugatti, Koenigsegg.. and majority of ppl drives something from Ford, VW or some asian stuff.

 

[TheGuruStud]

Most reviewers are getting it wrong. I saw several stating that gaming discrepancies are due to single thread IPC... that's obviously false. Ryzen would be at least keeping up with haswell, but it's not in a lot of games. They also compared it directly to kaby without a mention of the several hundred MHz clock difference. I guess they don't even know what IPC is.

Clearly, there are bios/cpu/scheduling issues and/or the games are only meant to run well on Intel. Otherwise, they would be within a reasonable margin of 6900K. That is not happening except in some games in some reviews. The reviews are all over the place.

And why did I see big losses at 1080 in some games, but noticeable leads at 1440? That should be impossible. Shit is jank and needs to be sorted. Reviewers and AMD need to get their shit straight. This could be worse than all the stupid bulldozer reviews that were inconsistent.

 

[Lionheart]

I just LOVE it when people say things like "developers should optimize their games better" and "developers should learn to multithread their games better" as if it were stupendously easy and totally viable in every case. For big studios, they could probably do better, although most of them are working on old ass APIs and engines that are simply limited in scope, and switching either of these would seriously disrupt their workflow, which in turn would set them back on timelines and $$$. For Indie games, they don't need 16 threads. Most of them barely need two.

Alright then lets be stuck on quad cores for another 10years then

 

[noname00]

I am glad on Monday a friend will receive his 1800x, and we will be able to compare it to my 6700k. I want to disable 4 cores on the Ryzen CPU and clock both of them to the same frequency, and then we will do some tests. I am really curious about the real IPC of both machines, and testing it myself is the best way to do this, even if I won't be able to disable half of the L3 cache on Ryzen.

 

[TheGuruStud]

I am glad on Monday a friend will receive his 1800x, and we will be able to compare it to my 6700k. I want to disable 4 cores on the Ryzen CPU and clock both of them to the same frequency, and then we will do some tests. I am really curious about the real IPC of both machines, and testing it myself is the best way to do this, even if I won't be able to disable half of the L3 cache on Ryzen.

It is disabled.

 

[jigar2speed]

Dunno why some are bashing AMD, I think they "FINALLY" got something to compete with Intel and at a decent price..

Because losing by 10 FPS at already 140 FPS feels bad to them... They keep forgetting the price and the performance where AMD is giving run for the money to Freaking THOUSAND DOLLAR CPU.

 

[XiGMAKiD]

Dunno why some are bashing AMD, I think they "FINALLY" got something to compete with Intel and at a decent price..

Because they're abroad the hype train expecting AMD to be flawless in every single way, except that is not what happened here with AMD's funky RAM implementation, barely-there overclocking headroom, just-like-the-old-days temp sensor, etc

Or maybe because they just love conflict no matter what happened

 

[GhostRyder]

Most reviewers are getting it wrong. I saw several stating that gaming discrepancies are due to single thread IPC... that's obviously false. Ryzen would be at least keeping up with haswell, but it's not in a lot of games. They also compared it directly to kaby without a mention of the several hundred MHz clock difference. I guess they don't even know what IPC is.

Clearly, there are bios/cpu/scheduling issues and/or the games are only meant to run well on Intel. Otherwise, they would be within a reasonable margin of 6900K. That is not happening except in some games in some reviews. The reviews are all over the place.

And why did I see big losses at 1080 in some games, but noticeable leads at 1440? That should be impossible. Shit is jank and needs to be sorted. Reviewers and AMD need to get their shit straight. This could be worse than all the stupid bulldozer reviews that were inconsistent.

Well said, that does seem to be the issue because otherwise alot of the programs and benchmarks they ran would be reflecting the same thing as the games. Its just going to take time for hte correct code paths to be adjusted for from AMD and the developers. Intel has been the main game for quite some time and this is a brand new architecture, everything will become more optimized in time.

 

[blued]

I am not going to make any final judgments on which CPU is best for me at this point in time. I have put off any CPU upgrade decisions for another 2-3 months. Lets see how things stand then. Maybe too many conflicting points of data at this point in time. Will let the dust settle and check on the CPU scene after (hopefully) some clarity in 2-3 months.

 

[rruff]

amd Ryzen has better gaming performance than intel (yes I said it - read few more lines before respond...)

Only problem is you are describing a very niche market that is also $$$ limited.

AMD needs to (eventually) sell to 4 and 6 core chips to the average Joe and do so at a profit. It will be tough if the game performance leaves much to Intel.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I think it will be a mix. I largely agree with you though. Since the 1060/480 segment is the most popular, most will be pairing these processors with that level of card, and probably a lot of 1070s too.

However, I'll say that whatever you pair it with the Ryzen processors aren't that bad at gaming, even if you do pair it with a GTX1080Ti or a Titan XP. And I'm sure there will be a good number of people buying GTX1080Ti cards and pairing them with Ryzen processors. The reason being that no one buying those cards is going to be playing at 1080p. And that is where people are going wrong. They are focusing too much on the 1080p benchmarks. The 1080p benchmarks have a place, they are done for a reason, I know that. They use the beefiest card/s possible, at basically the lowest resolution people are playing at, to limit the GPU bottleneck as much as possible and try to move the bottleneck to the CPU. The problem is that essentially becomes a synthetic benchmark to me. Because that is a scenario that will almost never happen.



Actually, $329. And it isn't that I think they got lazy. I think it is the same reasoning behind why Ryzen 1080 benchmarks aren't that reasonable. They are programming to the majority. The majority have 4-core or less processors. So that is what they program for.

Ryzen is going to force Intel to lower prices on their 6 and 8 core chips. So it isn't just that the AMD chips are reasonable now, it will make Intel's reasonable, and overall a lot more peoplegamers are going to be buying them.

I'd agree fully, I'm looking at all the reviews whilst owning 2x480 and a 4k monitor, are these reviewers taking the loss ,hardly any did resolution performance scaling tests and less still went 4k, enthusiasts by and large will buy these first ryzen and they won't be paid g them up with Vega or 1080ti attached to a 1080p monitor.

And as for blaming devs ,amd are stating facts, theirs is a NEW arch that needs some software optimisation to attain the full performance potential ,you bet and thank god ,because the sAme old shit wasn't cutting it for me I prefer my innovation to be both different and worthwhile and not just another 100 mhz bump, so yay back to you devs and engine devs ,while you're at that dx12 render path to take advantage of Moar cores do us all a favour, look into ryzen optimisation and possibly don't use Intel's compiler,as Ive no doubt its latest version will insist everything has to be 256bit aes encrypted or some such malougins.

 

[Batou1986]