Ryzen-A Fail for Gamers?

[Xenochus]

Many have expressed amazement on just how AMD was able to catch up to Intel with Ryzen, especially with the 1800X, in the computing and productivity sectors. However, from a purely gamer's perspective, it is almost impossible to miss the fact that 1800X trails Intel's 7700K slightly to significantly in virtually all the games tested. That wouldn't be too much of a problem normally, since we all know just aggressive AMD is with their CPU pricing.....except for some reason the 1800X retails for $500 while the 7700K goes for $300-350. It goes without saying the 1700X and 1700 is guaranteed to perform even worse.

So, am I missing something here as a gamer? From both performance and price points, the 1800X simply doens't have anything offer if you're a pure gamer (i.e. you do your real work at the office, and not at home), which probably encompasses large numbers of people here. Can anyone offer any counter analysis?

 

[Mockingbird]

It was know long ago that Ryzen 7 1800X is not going to be able to compete with the Core i7-7700K from pure a gaming perspective. Where have you been?

It was only disappointing because the Ryzen 7 1800X is not able to keep up with the Core i7-6900K in games.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

It was know long ago that Ryzen 7 1800X is not going to be able to compete with the Core i7-7700K from pure a gaming perspective. Where have you been?

It was only disappointing because the Ryzen 7 1800X is not able to keep up with the Core i7-6900K in games.

The 6900K can. If Ryzen were as fast as the 6900K across the board, it would compete with the 7700K.

 

[Burpo]

How many of these threads must we endure? Are gamers oblivious to the fact that the new Uarch will require some tweaking?

 

[Xenochus]

It was know long ago that Ryzen 7 1800X is not going to be able to compete with the Core i7-7700K from pure a gaming perspective. Where have you been?

It was only disappointing because the Ryzen 7 1800X is not able to keep up with the Core i7-6900K in games.

Yes, admittedly that's true. However, what I did not expect was AMD pricing the 1800X at $500 over the 7700K's $300-350. Even bigger problem is that there no signs the 1700X or 1700 can pick up the slack on the price to performance ratio either.

I understand this topic came up in the main Ryzen review mega thread, but there are no dedicated Ryzen review/analysis thread from a pure gamer's perspective

 

[R0H1T]

No, if you're a serious gamer you'd know that atm quad/hex cores is what most games utilize. The $ saved, by buying a 1700/x would be better spent elsewhere, namely on a beefier GPU.

 

[Xenochus]

No, if you're a serious gamer you'd know that atm quad/hex cores is what most games utilize. The $ saved, by buying a 1700/x would be better spent elsewhere, namely on a beefier GPU.

That would be plausible, except the lowest powered Ryzen, the 1700, costs the same price ($300) as the 7700K for some reason

 

[jihe]

What serious gamer game on 1080p??

 

[itsmydamnation]

Give it a few weeks before passing ultimate judgement.

We don't know how Zen responds to different latency memory. What mircocontroller code improvements may happen and what a better behaving scheduler will do.

After we know more in these areas then pass judgement, either good or bad.

 

[HexiumVII]

I think hyperthreading is ultimately pulling Ryzen back as I feared. When you have 8 physical cores, you don't really need hyperthreading anymore, it is just spreading resources thin for no reason. But it was needed more for marketing vs Intel, so they had to do it. Turn it off and we get much close to Intel.

 

[danEboy83]

What serious gamer game on 1080p??

Just would like to say, 1080p these days can achieve 144 fps or 120fps easily and in doing so can look silky smooth with the right monitor. 60 fps is up there to but even then it's a guaranteed steady 60 frames, and I have poor vision so the 1080p looks good to me any how .

 

[Greyguy1948]

I think hyperthreading is ultimately pulling Ryzen back as I feared. When you have 8 physical cores, you don't really need hyperthreading anymore, it is just spreading resources thin for no reason. But it was needed more for marketing vs Intel, so they had to do it. Turn it off and we get much close to Intel.

Yes this is the right test for games. Very interesting will also be Radeon Vega. Will it favor Ryzen?

 

[SPBHM]

What serious gamer game on 1080p??

lots

also some people have high refresh monitors these days,
and you are going to see drops to bellow 60FPS under some extreme load scenarios happening in higher res gaming

but, I think Ryzen is not a fail for gaming, failed to meet the expectation (based on how it compares to a 6900K), but that's about it.
if they can fix the SMT performance loss it's going to help to achieve the expected performance...

in any case I think Ryzen right now is probably good enough for gaming, and a well tuned one can do quite well (OC all cores to near 4GHz, disable SMT, run 2 sticks of fast ram and so on)

it might be a bigger problem for poorly optimized games, thinking of ARK with lots of buildings, MMO 16 people raiding, emulators and so on, but not sure.

 

[JimmiG]

It's only 10-15% behind the 7700K on average, so it's not a huge deal.

Newer BIOS revisions might fix issues and improve performance. Also I read disabling HPET can improve performance. There might also be an update to Windows to prevent it from unnecessarily moving threads between CCX clusters. Also, you should use High Performance power saving mode because power saving is handled in hardware with Ryzen (SenseMI).

Of course, nobody knows how much future improvements and tweaks can improve performance. Might be <1% or 20%. The Anandtech gaming results should be interesting, as they will be using more recent BIOS versions than everyone else.

 

[imported_jjj]

It's only a problem for less than the top 5% of the gamers- top 5% in spending on the GPU not in skill or passion.
Less because most don't game at lower than optimal resolution and even if they do, there is no practical difference in perception between 100FPS and 120FPS on desktop where many games would land even for those.
The big problem is a matter of perception as reviewers are out of touch and failing at their jobs. They should test what matters for most users first and address corner cases afterwards.
It also depends on games Ryzen does better than the 7700k in some games even at lower that ideal res.

Steam Survery GPU usage,look how few have a GPU faster than a 480 or 1060 http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
And Steam is not representative for the global gamer as mostly gamers from developed nations can afford to pay for games.

There does seem that there is a problem beyond IPC and hopefully we understand it soon - i know the current speculations. It is a turnoff even for users that know they won't be impacted by it.
The lack of more PCIe lanes is also a bummer.Even if it was just to be able to add an x8 SSD in a couple of years and still run the GPU at x16.
It does suggest that AMD might focus Crossfire on single boards with dual or more GPUs.

 

[strategyfreak]

That would be plausible, except the lowest powered Ryzen, the 1700, costs the same price ($300) as the 7700K for some reason

"Some reason" may have something to do with the fact that you're getting 2x the cores...

The ryzen 8c/16t cpus may not be the fastest in gaming, but having 8 cores vs 4 is a significant increase for a number of applications, so to argue that it shouldn't cost more simply because it's slower at gaming is a bit misleading. By your argument a 6900k is just as overpriced.

 

[mikk]

https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/luke-hill/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu-review/10/

Disappointing stuff.

 

[Gideon]

https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/luke-hill/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu-review/10/

Disappointing stuff.

Yes, it definitely isn't great at the moment. But at least 2 of those games listed there will be improved upon significantly (AotS, Warhammer):
https://www.techpowerup.com/231198/amd-responds-to-ryzens-lower-than-expected-1080p-performance

Oxide Games, creators of the Nitrous game engine that powers Ashes of the Singularity:

"Oxide games is incredibly excited with what we are seeing from the Ryzen CPU. Using our Nitrous game engine, we are working to scale our existing and future game title performance to take full advantage of Ryzen and its 8-core, 16-thread architecture, and the results thus far are impressive. These optimizations are not yet available for Ryzen benchmarking. However, expect updates soon to enhance the performance of games like Ashes of the Singularity on Ryzen CPUs, as well as our future game releases." - Brad Wardell, CEO Stardock and Oxide

And Creative Assembly, the creators of the Total War Series and, more recently, Halo Wars 2:

"Creative Assembly is committed to reviewing and optimizing its games on the all-new Ryzen CPU. While current third-party testing doesn't reflect this yet, our joint optimization program with AMD means that we are looking at options to deliver performance optimization updates in the future to provide better performance on Ryzen CPUs moving forward. "

And there is also a ~7-8% SMT performance penalty in most games, that I presume will be fixed in the future (if by no other means then at least game profiles). Without SMT 1800X has abou the same performance as a 4790K

 

[flash-gordon]

All sites just reviewed the gifts they received from AMD but didn't tried to truly investigate anything.

Tom's saw that 1800X consumed only 56W with Metro: LL but didn't found it strange or tried any other game where the performance was lack-lusting. Anywhere else I read people not even show power consumption while gaming.

For real, I can conclude anything.

Also, Hothardware (one the last that deserve praise) at least asked someone:

“Oxide games is incredibly excited with what we are seeing from the Ryzen CPU. Using our Nitrous game engine, we are working to scale our existing and future game title performance to take full advantage of Ryzen and its 8-core, 16-thread architecture, and the results thus far are impressive. These optimizations are not yet available for Ryzen benchmarking. However, expect updates soon to enhance the performance of games like Ashes of the Singularity on Ryzen CPUs, as well as our future game releases” ,said Brad Wardell, CEO Stardock and Oxide.
Read more at http://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-...chmarks-and-review?page=8#CDqO9PzqWBsxuIee.99

We know the relations between Oxide/AMD, but let's see how it turns...

 

[RichUK]

Ryzen is good if you like to play photoshop.

 

[french toast]

Ryzen is good if you like to play photoshop.

Thats some mediocre trolling right there, try and inject some wit in future.
#6/10.

Lets give AMD some time shall we before burying them.
If you cant wait buy an intel and sleep well.

 

[scannall]

I do a lot of modeling and rendering. Plus my gaming is at 4k. So for me, all this nonsense about gaming on 1080p is just that. Nonsense. AMD has made a real winner here, and all these tears over edge cases is just crazy.

 

[guachi]

While there are lots of people who game at 1080, how many of those who game at 1080 use a Titan/1080 GPU and a $300-1000 CPU?

If the majority of 1080 gamers use a 1060 or 480, for example, test the CPU with that and let users know if it's worthwhile to upgrade. I currently have a 480 GPU and an 8350 CPU. I've seen zero reviews that tested on a 480 so I have no idea what difference (if any) I'll see in my games. That would be useful to me.

 

[JimmiG]

While there are lots of people who game at 1080, how many of those who game at 1080 use a Titan/1080 GPU and a $300-1000 CPU?

If the majority of 1080 gamers use a 1060 or 480, for example, test the CPU with that and let users know if it's worthwhile to upgrade. I currently have a 480 GPU and an 8350 CPU. I've seen zero reviews that tested on a 480 so I have no idea what difference (if any) I'll see in my games. That would be useful to me.

Defintely worth testing, but I doubt the story would be different. The reason there's less of a performance difference at higher resolutions is because the bottleneck is shifted to the GPU. It doesn't have anything to do with the resolution specifically. If you had some hypothetical GTX 1280 TI that could run 4K with barely a performance hit, the difference between Ryzen and I7 would be larger even at 4K.

Ryzen doesn't magically get faster when you increase the resolution (or slower when you decrease it). It's all about balance and bottlenecks. Basically 1080p with an RX480 = 1440p with a 1080 (in terms of CPU/GPU bottlenecks, not absolute FPS numbers).

 

[Ancalagon44]

Seeing all the inconsistency in its gaming performance, I'd wait a month before I evaluated whether it is a fail for gamers or not.

To be honest though, while it may have been marketed as AMD's highest end desktop processor, I don't think gamers are the target market. I think this is a better chip for workstations than it is gaming machines. Gamers would probably be better off buying a 6C or even 4C Ryzen and spending the extra cash on a better motherboard or GPU.