Question Interesting mobile CPU comparison

EliteRetard

Diamond Member
Mar 6, 2006
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Happened to see this a few days ago, thought it might be worth sharing here.
Couldn't think of anything interesting or worth adding of my own, so just posting it as is now.

Good to see fewer compromises in an AMD laptop.
 
Last edited:

Vattila

Senior member
Oct 22, 2004
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Those are great reviews and comparative analysis. Here are the corresponding articles at TechSpot:


As a programmer I am somewhat puzzled about what makes the performance difference from game to game of similar genre. Ryzen actually wins some, even if it is a small minority. What is special about these wins? Is it:
  1. Poor code (i.e. Ryzen does best generally or incidentally on poor code)?
  2. Good code for both platforms, giving Ryzen the edge? If so, is it (a) just generally good programming with common code that runs well on both platforms, or (b) separate code paths for Ryzen, due to targeted (and perhaps AMD assisted/sponsored) optimisation effort?
  3. Good code for Ryzen, poor code for Core (though unlikely given Intel's market domination)?
My guess is 2a, perhaps 2b, and that PC game developers are still neglecting testing and performance tuning for Ryzen (in particular, avoiding unnecessary performance degradation due to certain programming constructs and/or instruction sequences), due to Intel's market dominance and perceived CPU lead in gaming.

Perhaps development tools have something to do with it. Intel may have a strong foothold in compiler, debugger and performance analysis software.
 

epsilon84

Golden Member
Aug 29, 2010
1,142
927
136
Those are great reviews and comparative analysis. Here are the corresponding articles at TechSpot:


As a programmer I am somewhat puzzled about what makes the performance difference from game to game of similar genre. Ryzen actually wins some, even if it is a small minority. What is special about these wins? Is it:
  1. Poor code (i.e. Ryzen does best generally or incidentally on poor code)?
  2. Good code for both platforms, giving Ryzen the edge? If so, is it (a) just generally good programming with common code that runs well on both platforms, or (b) separate code paths for Ryzen, due to targeted (and perhaps AMD assisted/sponsored) optimisation effort?
  3. Good code for Ryzen, poor code for Core (though unlikely given Intel's market domination)?
My guess is 2a, perhaps 2b, and that PC game developers are still neglecting testing and performance tuning for Ryzen (in particular, avoiding unnecessary performance degradation due to certain programming constructs and/or instruction sequences), due to Intel's market dominance and perceived CPU lead in gaming.

Perhaps development tools have something to do with it. Intel may have a strong foothold in compiler, debugger and performance analysis software.

From what I've seen, heavily multi-threaded titles seem to perform relatively best on Ryzen. Intel has the single thread / latency advantage so if a game heavily relies on a main thread (or few) to run game code then you'll generally see Intel pull ahead in those titles.

I can't speak about the coding quality of games as I'm not a programmer, but architectural differences would surely have to be one of the reasons why gaming performance differs so much across different engines.