Official AMD Ryzen Benchmarks, Reviews, Prices, and Discussion

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Puffnstuff

Lifer
Mar 9, 2005
16,015
4,785
136
In that case ill probably get a r7 1700 later on in the year when mobos are sorted.
This exactly is how I feel about this. If I had to build a new machine right now I'd chose the ryzen but I'm not liking the lack of choice in motherboards. It would be preferable to wait until things settle down a bit before deciding on what components to buy. I'm running a 4790k on an Asus Maximus VII Hero right now which is plenty fast for my purposes so I'm not in any kind of hurry nor am I able to financially. I want my next build to be the fastest pc I'd done to date and that will require a new gpu and nvme drives to compliment the cpu/mb/ram selection. I'll probably step down to a smaller case as well as my HAF932 is just too big and heavy and I don't run multiple cards anymore.
 
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looncraz

Senior member
Sep 12, 2011
722
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Causes of poor gaming relative to CPU performance of Ryzen:

1. Windows is load-balancing across CCXes.
This means that a thread is being moved around on the CPU - which is normal - so that a single core isn't used more than others. On Ryzen, that needs to happen ONLY within a CCX, otherwise you will incur a massive penalty when that thread no longer finds its data in the caches of the CCX.

2. SMT hurts single threaded performance due to shared structure.
Ryzen statically partitions three structures to support SMT:
a. Micro-op queue (dispatcher)
b. Retirement queue
c. Store queue

This means that, with SMT enabled, these resources are cut, potentially, in HALF (mind you, these are just queues that impact throughput of a single thread).

3. Memory latency quirks still not worked out.
Gaming can be quite sensitive to memory latency and bandwidth. These issues will be, most likely, remedied with BIOS updates.

Combined you can see, clearly, what is happening and most of the reviews make sense.

A Windows driver update to treat each CCX almost as if it were its own CPU will help immensely. The SMT problem is likely PERMANENT... unless AMD can adjust the partitioning with microcode, which I doubt.

What this all means is simple: once the Windows update has landed, BIOSes are patched up, and SMT is disabled, an 8-core Ryzen will likely be competitive with a quad i7 in gaming while blowing past it in multi-threaded. If all you do is game, then the 1700 may well become a very valid option that will work increasingly better in future games.

This also lets us know where Zen 2 will be able to improve the most. Make the impacted queues competitively shared (or just a little larger), improve inter-CCX communications, decouple the L3 speed from core speeds (for higher core clocks), and a few other relatively simple tweaks and you have a second generation Ryzen that steals the show.

We also know why AMD hasn't released anything other than their 8-core chips - these issues need to be ironed out in production. You need thousands of eyes and testers and numerous companies each responding to their customers' needs to get a grip on what is most important to fix before finalizing Zen 2.
 

french toast

Senior member
Feb 22, 2017
988
825
136
Not ridiculous at all. Try running a new very good graphics game with 1080p ULTRA settings like The Witcher 3, my Nvidia 1080 can hit 47 fps at times. I want 60fps minimum, and that is with a cpu that is much faster than Ryzen, a 4.7GHz Intel quad core with super expensive CL 7 2133 ram. Playing at 1080p on a nice 32" HDTV on the couch is something normal people like, and they like to have 60fps or above, which Ryzen sometimes won't be able to deliver and Nvidia 1080 sometimes won't also. And games don't look any better at 4k with low or normal settings than at 1080p with Ultra settings and good anti-aliasing.
If you are only getting 47fps with a 1080 on 1080p ultra then that tells me you are bottlenecked somewhere, im certain a r7 1700 @ 3.9ghz would murder it even without any updates.
 
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moonbogg

Lifer
Jan 8, 2011
10,635
3,095
136
Serious question: why didn't you wait for the reviews before buying?

AMD tricked me into thinking this was faster than a 6900K. I also believed it would OC at least decently due to the advertised 4ghz stock clocks. AMD also told me that XFR was a celebrated auto overclocking feature, which convinced me that these chips were at least decent overclockers. I was shown cherry picked benchmarks that showed very high IPC despite clock speed deficits. I fell for it, got snagged by the hype train and was dragged along by my pants about 10 miles before finally falling off and smacking headfirst into the great wall of reason.
I knew it was a stupid thing to do and I admitted it when I said I was preordering. I did it partially for the thrill, knowing it was a gamble. Well, I seem to have lost that gamble.
 
Mar 10, 2006
11,715
2,012
126
AMD tricked me into thinking this was faster than a 6900K. I also believed it would OC at least decently due to the advertised 4ghz stock clocks. AMD also told me that XFR was a celebrated auto overclocking feature, which convinced me that these chips were at least decent overclockers. I was shown cherry picked benchmarks that showed very high IPC despite clock speed deficits. I fell for it, got snagged by the hype train and was dragged along by my pants about 10 miles before finally falling off and smacking headfirst into the great wall of reason.
I knew it was a stupid thing to do and I admitted it when I said I was preordering. I did it partially for the thrill, knowing it was a gamble. Well, I seem to have lost that gamble.

Hah, happens to us all man. I pre-order NVIDIA cards sight unseen, but fortunately those bets have worked for me :)
 

unseenmorbidity

Golden Member
Nov 27, 2016
1,395
967
96
We also know why AMD hasn't released anything other than their 8-core chips - these issues need to be ironed out in production. You need thousands of eyes and testers and numerous companies each responding to their customers' needs to get a grip on what is most important to fix before finalizing Zen 2.

I don't get this part. Are you suggesting the R5 will be better optimized somehow?
 

Rifter

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,522
751
126
People need to take a step back and look at this objectively.

The hype was huge and alot of people bought into this to much and its causing bias now that the wide variety of numbers are out.

What we are getting is a chip that in productivity/content creation applications is pretty much equal to the 8 core intel chip that costs twice as much, so for productivity/content creation AMD has a 2/1 price/performance advantage, this is huge. The fact that so many are completely disregarding AMDs 2/1 price/perf advantage just shows who the real fanboys are. Gaming is not the only thing done with PC's, its probably not even the most used application for PC's by a huge margin.

And speaking of gaming there is obviously bios/OS issues, as it seem the Asus board and the MSI board do not do nearly as well as the gigabyte board, this is made worse by AMD distributing the Asus and MSI boards with the CPU's for reviews, AMD really screwed that up, thats on them for providing buggy mobo's for reviews. This will be sorted out in time with bios and os updates, as well as game code modified for the new CPU. This will take time but it will work itself out, also this only effects people running 1080p on lower settings, if you run ultra or higher resolution then zen performs the same as every other CPU, and from what i can tell does so with better frametimes making for a much smoother gaming experience. And really who is buying a $500 CPU to run 1080p on low anyways, my 6 year old GTX 460 i had before my RX 480 could run 1080p on low so if you are trying to run a 5-7 year old GPU with zen and then complaining of low gaming performance i dunno what to tell you other than bring your GPU into this century. This just shows how most review sites are seriously biased as well, only a few games reviewed and at 1080p low setting is a complete disgrace to reviewers everywhere and the sites doing this should be ashamed of themselves. Its actually hard to find 1440p and 4k results which is just sad in todays world, so much bias even in reviewers. Seriously who is spending $500 on a HEDT CPU to game at 1080p low setting, its just unreal how some people go so far out of their way to confirm there bias.

And for the people complaining about the bugs this happens with every new CPU arch thats ever been released, intel has even recalled CPU's before and NEVER fixed them, the 1.1ghz P3's if i recall correctly never got fixed after the recall, but of course when AMD has a few bugs it its the end of the world....... There were bios issues with x99, and if i recall correctly mobo issues with SB. This is NORMAL for new releases. this is why you dont jump on new tech thats completely new arch on the first day unless you are ok with being the beta tester. Expecting it to work right at 100% performance out of the box for something as new and different as this is extremely naive. This is why alot of people are waiting this growing pains out and letting the dust settle.

Bottom line is if all you do is gaming them zen is probably not for you, buy a i5 or i7 KL and call it a day. If however you actually use your PC as a PC not just as a gaming console/platform then zen offers twice the performance for the price of intel, even more than that taking into consideration mobo prices and quad channel ram needed for intel HEDT.

Since i use my PC for photo work and video compression/editing as well as gaming i will be upgrading to zen. I may also replace a few physical home servers with VM's depending on how well zen does with VM's. But not for months until these bugs are worked out, and i can decide which SKU to get to OC and play with, likely the 1700 going by initial results.

Try not to get so emotional guys, stay calm, look at a wide variety of reviews, and do what works best for your given situation. Probably best to wait for the bug fixes though.
 

LTC8K6

Lifer
Mar 10, 2004
28,520
1,575
126
It boggles the mind that they didn't work out the Windows driver before launch.

Seems like that's critical.
 

HannooFX

Member
Jun 6, 2016
56
22
41
People need to take a step back and look at this objectively.

The hype was huge and alot of people bought into this to much and its causing bias now that the wide variety of numbers are out.

What we are getting is a chip that in productivity/content creation applications is pretty much equal to the 8 core intel chip that costs twice as much, so for productivity/content creation AMD has a 2/1 price/performance advantage, this is huge. The fact that so many are completely disregarding AMDs 2/1 price/perf advantage just shows who the real fanboys are. Gaming is not the only thing done with PC's, its probably not even the most used application for PC's by a huge margin.

And speaking of gaming there is obviously bios/OS issues, as it seem the Asus board and the MSI board do not do nearly as well as the gigabyte board, this is made worse by AMD distributing the Asus and MSI boards with the CPU's for reviews, AMD really screwed that up, thats on them for providing buggy mobo's for reviews. This will be sorted out in time with bios and os updates, as well as game code modified for the new CPU. This will take time but it will work itself out, also this only effects people running 1080p on lower settings, if you run ultra or higher resolution then zen performs the same as every other CPU, and from what i can tell does so with better frametimes making for a much smoother gaming experience. And really who is buying a $500 CPU to run 1080p on low anyways, my 6 year old GTX 460 i had before my RX 480 could run 1080p on low so if you are trying to run a 5-7 year old GPU with zen and then complaining of low gaming performance i dunno what to tell you other than bring your GPU into this century. This just shows how most review sites are seriously biased as well, only a few games reviewed and at 1080p low setting is a complete disgrace to reviewers everywhere and the sites doing this should be ashamed of themselves. Its actually hard to find 1440p and 4k results which is just sad in todays world, so much bias even in reviewers. Seriously who is spending $500 on a HEDT CPU to game at 1080p low setting, its just unreal how some people go so far out of their way to confirm there bias.

And for the people complaining about the bugs this happens with every new CPU arch thats ever been released, intel has even recalled CPU's before and NEVER fixed them, the 1.1ghz P3's if i recall correctly never got fixed after the recall, but of course when AMD has a few bugs it its the end of the world....... There were bios issues with x99, and if i recall correctly mobo issues with SB. This is NORMAL for new releases. this is why you dont jump on new tech thats completely new arch on the first day unless you are ok with being the beta tester. Expecting it to work right at 100% performance out of the box for something as new and different as this is extremely naive. This is why alot of people are waiting this growing pains out and letting the dust settle.

Bottom line is if all you do is gaming them zen is probably not for you, buy a i5 or i7 KL and call it a day. If however you actually use your PC as a PC not just as a gaming console/platform then zen offers twice the performance for the price of intel, even more than that taking into consideration mobo prices and quad channel ram needed for intel HEDT.

Since i use my PC for photo work and video compression/editing as well as gaming i will be upgrading to zen. I may also replace a few physical home servers with VM's depending on how well zen does with VM's. But not for months until these bugs are worked out, and i can decide which SKU to get to OC and play with, likely the 1700 going by initial results.

Try not to get so emotional guys, stay calm, look at a wide variety of reviews, and do what works best for your given situation. Probably best to wait for the bug fixes though.
Well said.
 
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scannall

Golden Member
Jan 1, 2012
1,944
1,638
136
People need to take a step back and look at this objectively.

The hype was huge and alot of people bought into this to much and its causing bias now that the wide variety of numbers are out.

What we are getting is a chip that in productivity/content creation applications is pretty much equal to the 8 core intel chip that costs twice as much, so for productivity/content creation AMD has a 2/1 price/performance advantage, this is huge. The fact that so many are completely disregarding AMDs 2/1 price/perf advantage just shows who the real fanboys are. Gaming is not the only thing done with PC's, its probably not even the most used application for PC's by a huge margin.

And speaking of gaming there is obviously bios/OS issues, as it seem the Asus board and the MSI board do not do nearly as well as the gigabyte board, this is made worse by AMD distributing the Asus and MSI boards with the CPU's for reviews, AMD really screwed that up, thats on them for providing buggy mobo's for reviews. This will be sorted out in time with bios and os updates, as well as game code modified for the new CPU. This will take time but it will work itself out, also this only effects people running 1080p on lower settings, if you run ultra or higher resolution then zen performs the same as every other CPU, and from what i can tell does so with better frametimes making for a much smoother gaming experience. And really who is buying a $500 CPU to run 1080p on low anyways, my 6 year old GTX 460 i had before my RX 480 could run 1080p on low so if you are trying to run a 5-7 year old GPU with zen and then complaining of low gaming performance i dunno what to tell you other than bring your GPU into this century. This just shows how most review sites are seriously biased as well, only a few games reviewed and at 1080p low setting is a complete disgrace to reviewers everywhere and the sites doing this should be ashamed of themselves. Its actually hard to find 1440p and 4k results which is just sad in todays world, so much bias even in reviewers. Seriously who is spending $500 on a HEDT CPU to game at 1080p low setting, its just unreal how some people go so far out of their way to confirm there bias.

And for the people complaining about the bugs this happens with every new CPU arch thats ever been released, intel has even recalled CPU's before and NEVER fixed them, the 1.1ghz P3's if i recall correctly never got fixed after the recall, but of course when AMD has a few bugs it its the end of the world....... There were bios issues with x99, and if i recall correctly mobo issues with SB. This is NORMAL for new releases. this is why you dont jump on new tech thats completely new arch on the first day unless you are ok with being the beta tester. Expecting it to work right at 100% performance out of the box for something as new and different as this is extremely naive. This is why alot of people are waiting this growing pains out and letting the dust settle.

Bottom line is if all you do is gaming them zen is probably not for you, buy a i5 or i7 KL and call it a day. If however you actually use your PC as a PC not just as a gaming console/platform then zen offers twice the performance for the price of intel, even more than that taking into consideration mobo prices and quad channel ram needed for intel HEDT.

Since i use my PC for photo work and video compression/editing as well as gaming i will be upgrading to zen. I may also replace a few physical home servers with VM's depending on how well zen does with VM's. But not for months until these bugs are worked out, and i can decide which SKU to get to OC and play with, likely the 1700 going by initial results.

Try not to get so emotional guys, stay calm, look at a wide variety of reviews, and do what works best for your given situation. Probably best to wait for the bug fixes though.
This is the internet, common sense isn't allowed here. ;-)
 

french toast

Senior member
Feb 22, 2017
988
825
136
AMD tricked me into thinking this was faster than a 6900K. I also believed it would OC at least decently due to the advertised 4ghz stock clocks. AMD also told me that XFR was a celebrated auto overclocking feature, which convinced me that these chips were at least decent overclockers. I was shown cherry picked benchmarks that showed very high IPC despite clock speed deficits. I fell for it, got snagged by the hype train and was dragged along by my pants about 10 miles before finally falling off and smacking headfirst into the great wall of reason.
I knew it was a stupid thing to do and I admitted it when I said I was preordering. I did it partially for the thrill, knowing it was a gamble. Well, I seem to have lost that gamble.
what? Cherry picked benchmarks ? All companies show themselves in the best light but there is no evidence amd led you up the garden path. All the benchmarks including single thread have checked out, with ryzen being faster in some, slower in others.

They didn't say it would be great in 120fps 1080p gaming did they? They specifically showed 4k gaming scenarios which for the most part is representative of the settings people buying these systems would use.
Neither did they promise or even hint at amazing overclocks,broadwell at twice the price only gets to 200mhz more.
You are getting 6900k performance for half the price unless you ordered the 1700, in which the value level is even better.
By all accounts any issues are likely software based, which may also marginally improve overclocks.

Be honest did you buy the system for 120fps 1080p gaming sessions? If not what are you complaining about?
 

dahorns

Senior member
Sep 13, 2013
550
83
91
Gaming is not the only thing done with PC's, its probably not even the most used application for PC's by a huge margin.
* * *
Bottom line is if all you do is gaming them zen is probably not for you, buy a i5 or i7 KL and call it a day. If however you actually use your PC as a PC not just as a gaming console/platform then zen offers twice the performance for the price of intel, even more than that taking into consideration mobo prices and quad channel ram needed for intel HEDT.

I mean, if we are going to talk about most used applications, aren't talking about office productivity and doing things like opening pdfs and webpages? And aren't those things that KL also does much better?

The suggestion that KL only wins if all you care about is gaming is clearly false. For the vast majority of users, KL is going to be faster in their day to day tasks. But a large segment of people need the type of horsepower that Ryzen provides, and now they can get it for a fraction of what Intel was charging. We all win!
 
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Crumpet

Senior member
Jan 15, 2017
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In that post;

Why there is huge discrepancy is gaming benchmarks for reviewers today? Is this something related to BIOS update?

AMD_LisaSuCEO of AMD 148 points 48 minutes ago

Ryzen is doing really well in 1440p and 4K gaming when the applications are more graphics bound. And we do exceptionally well in rendering and workstation applications where more cores are really useful. In 1080p, we have tested over 100+ titles in the labs…. And depending on the test conditions, we do better in some games and worse in others. We hear people on wanting to see improved 1080p performance and we fully expect that Ryzen performance in 1080p will only get better as developers get more time with “Zen”. We have over 300+ developers now working with "Zen" and several of the developers for Ashes of Singularity and Total Warhammer are actively optimizing now


But isn't it unfair to compare CPUs if there is GPU bottleneck? Then all CPUs will perform similarly.

AMD_RobertTechnical Marketing 21 points 17 minutes ago

First, I think it's important that readers get a complete picture of a processor. People who have 1440p and 4K displays deserve to read how their potential processor will perform on the monitor they have. Don't you agree? We're also not shying away from the 1080p results. We clearly have some work to do with game developers on some of these titles to invest in the vital optimizations that can so dramatically improve an application's performance on a new microarchitecture. This takes time, but we'll get it done. But what's also clear is that there's a distribution of games that run well, and a distribution of games that run poorly. Call it a "bell curve" if you will. It's unfortunate that the outliers are some notable titles, but many of these game devs (e.g. Oxide, Sega, Bethesda) have already said there's significant improvement that can be gleaned. We have proven the Zen performance and IPC. Many reviewers today proved that, at 1080p in games. There is no architectural reason why the remaining titles should be performing as they are.
 
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