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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

+hardware

Some Soylentils were disappointed by the gaming performance of AMD's Ryzen CPUs when they were launched last month [soylentnews.org]. By now, updates have eliminated some of the advantage [arstechnica.com] 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 [arstechnica.com], 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 [arstechnica.com].

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 [pcper.com] 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).

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