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Some Soylentils were disappointed by the gaming performance of AMD's Ryzen CPUs when they were launched last month. By now, updates have eliminated some of the advantage that Intel CPUs had, but the potential gains differ depending on the game:
The first big Ryzen patch was for Ashes of the Singularity. Ryzen's performance in Ashes was arguably one of the more surprising findings in the initial benchmarking. The game has been widely used as a kind of showcase for the advantages of DirectX 12 and the multithreaded scaling that it shows. We spoke to the game's developers, and they told us that its engine splits up the work it has to do between multiple cores automatically.
In general, the Ryzen 1800X performed at about the same level as Intel's Broadwell-E 6900K. Both parts are 8-core, 16-thread chips, and while Broadwell-E has a modest instructions-per-cycle advantage in most workloads, Ryzen's higher clock speed is enough to make up for that deficit. But in Ashes of the Singularity under DirectX 12, the 6900K had average frame rates about 25 percent better than the AMD chip.
In late March, Oxide/Stardock released a Ryzen performance update for Ashes, and it has gone a long way toward closing that gap. PC Perspective tested the update, and depending on graphics settings and memory clock speeds, Ryzen's average frame rate went up by between 17 and 31 percent. The 1800X still trails the 6900K, but now the gap is about 9 percent, or even less with overclocked memory (but we'll talk more about memory later on).
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:08AM
Did I say anywhere it couldn't be used as a gaming chip? Its just not what it was designed for no different than how nobody takes the newest $1100 Intel CPU and claims its a gaming CPU, in fact the previous generation i5 has been shown to beat the top of the line Kaby Lake i7 in most games by a decent amount.
What I did say is its pointless as a gaming CPU simply because nowhere in the near future are we gonna have 16 thread games in all honesty I'd be amazed if we are even up to 8 threads by 2020 what with so many games as of 2017 only using a couple of threads. But ya know what has no problem using all 16 threads? Workstation loads! Things like multitrack audio editing and video editing (frankly the only time my FX-8320e doesn't have half its cores parked from lack of things to do, in fact I don't think I've played a game on my system yet where half my cores aren't parked) and DB processing and a bazillion other workloads one builds a workstation for and for those tasks? Frankly the R7 BEATS the $1100 Intel CPU as it has all the features you'd want in a workstation class chip like support for ECC and virtual machines.
Now if you want to buy an R7 1800x for gaming? Go right ahead but you are buying the equivalent of a top fuel funny car to do your grocery shopping, I seriously doubt even half the threads are ever gonna be used. IMHO the better option would be to buy the R5 (which you can buy right now, several retailers have jumped the gun and put their stock for sale the second they got their mitts on 'em) and use the savings to buy a better GPU which will give you a better all around experience, but if you just have money to burn and want it just to say you have 16 threads? Hell there are guys out there running SLI Titans in 1080p, seems kinda pointless but its your money, blow away.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.