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AMD addresses Ryzen 7/Windows 10 Thread Scheduler concerns

As successful and positive as AMD's Ryzen 7 CPU launch was, there has been some controversy surrounding gaming performance, particularly at 1080p. There have been all sorts of theories surrounding why Ryzen might be underperforming at 1080p in some titles, despite AMD's previous efforts to explain the situation. One of the more prevalent theories was that Microsoft's Windows 10 Thread Scheduler wasn't co-operating with the Zen architecture. However, this week AMD came out to put that theory to rest.

In a Community Update addressing Windows 10 thread scheduling concerns, AMD said that it has investigated reports of Windows 10 hampering Ryzen performance and found that the Windows 10 Thread Scheduler was operating correctly:

“Based on our findings, AMD believes that the Windows 10 thread scheduler is operating properly for “Zen,” and we do not presently believe there is an issue with the scheduler adversely utilizing the logical and physical configurations of the architecture.”

AMD's investigation also came to the conclusion that an outdated version of the Sysinternals Coreinfo utility was being used by those who claiming to have found Windows 10 adversely affecting Ryzen performance. Finally, AMD also ran tests to ensure there weren't any major disparities between Windows 7 thread scheduling and Windows 10, coming to the conclusion that there is no issue between these two versions of the operating system.

KitGuru Says: I have heard some crazy theories regarding Ryzen's lower than expected gaming performance at 1080p, though thread scheduling was one of the more plausible possibilities. Fortunately, there doesn't appear to be any issue there, so perhaps the situation is just as AMD previously explained, PC games just need to start being optimised for AMD CPUs once again. 

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12 comments

  1. From what I have heard is that it all boils down to the 2 Quad core setups that make the 8 core in the CPU. They are not together and the L3 cache for each group is not together so when a game engine or any software for that matter does not utilize the CPU properly you get cache misses and added latency from it. That is why when you see some games doing great with Ryzen they are either only using 4/8 or just one side of the CPU or are actually utilizing the whole CPU properly and you get great performance.

    That’s when tests in Cinebench R15 and others show the Ryzen performing as expected and either matching or beating the 6900K and the 7700K the CPU is being used to it’s fullest and performing as such. The one video I watched tries to explain all of this and the even goes as far to say that back in the day when you had a 2 socket system with 2 CPU’s to think of the Ryzen kind of like that a NUMA setup and that Windows was able to handle this through it’s drivers. He goes on to say this driver is not enabled in Windows and for the Ryzen. I don’t know how much water that holds to be true or if it would even work and make it perform better in games or if the Ryzen would even respond to that in a favorable way. I think the solution will be as AMD said the games that are a bit lower for performance will need a patch to be able to use the CPU in the proper way.

    When the Ryzen does good in a game it either matches or comes very close to a higher clocked Intel part this shows the Ryzen have the brute force power to do better because it has to make up for the lack of the higher IPC and clock speeds intel has. Will it ever beat a 7700K probably not it is hard to beat something that when overclocked is 1000Mhz faster. Will it come close yes most likely it already is in a lot of games and kicking butt in workstation related stuff.

  2. Actually the article does not state that there is no issues between the two versions, just that it is not an issue in the scheduler. The article on their website *does* state that the difference between the two OSes in performance may be down to architectural differences.

  3. “Will it ever beat a 7700K probably not it is hard to beat something that when overclocked is 1000Mhz faster.”

    When games are optimised for 8 cores/16 threads it will. Bare in mind that Oxide games and Bethesda Softwork’s various studios are already working with AMD engineers to do this and AMD says 300+ Ryzen devkits have already been shipped, many of which are going to game developers.

  4. This is also true I did not think of that. In new games that use 8/16 threads it could be a game changer for sure. Heck even if already released games get some new code to support the Ryzens better it could bring up the performance a bit in those games that Ryzen is getting lower than expected results. I still think currently released games may not see the performance gains if they get updated code to bring up performance as the new unreleased games will that have the companies working with AMD to optimize things for 8/16 threads and avoid jumping from 1 CPU cluster to the other.

    I think the 4/8 core Ryzens will probably be a lot more steady in more of the games since the second core cluster will not be there. I think we will see then not getting much if any FPS in the games that Ryzen already scores good in but we may see those few games that Ryzen 8/16 score lower in get a bump in FPS on the 4/8 because the second core cluster is not there so it won’t have the latency of switching core clusters like those games have on the 8/16 Ryzens. I guess only time will tell how it all works out.

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  6. And btw, we know which is the first game that supports 8-core/16-threads (officially announced it does by Chris Roberts), and yes you guessed it, it’s Star Citizen. We will see more in the comming years, but when you look some of the benchmarks, BF1 does utilize the cpu quite well.

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  8. Why would game developers optimize especially for AMD, if by far the most gamers use Intel. They didn’t optimize for Bulldozer/Piledriver/etc… for the very same reason.
    However, while the gaming performance is worse, gamers will mainly buy Intel, so the market share hand in hand with the number of games optimized for Ryzen won’t go up.

  9. Nope! Game devs didn’t optimize for buldozer/pilledriver cuz it wasn’t delivering, so gamers would go for intel, now Ryzen IS delivering in performance so yes they should optmize for Ryzen since a LOT of gamers will buy Ryzen, since it’s good enough for 90% of the people (remember ryzen is NOT bad for gaming, it’s actually equal or close enough to a 6600K and there’s lots of people using a 6600k and lots of others that wish they had a 6600k, now they can since ryzen is cheap! + Anyone that is not playing above 120hz has no reason to buy intel, since they can buy Ryzen cheaper LOL… Oh and bellow 120Hz is the majority of gamers, also keep in mind the “benchmarks” done by the press uses a clean, fresh windows install and we all know that’s not reallistic, any ordinary gamer will have other programs running in background, that will impact game performance in intel chips since low amount of cores, but won’t in ryzen since with more cores, the system is able to simply move a given process, say a google chrome with 20 tabs from core1 to core5 and beyond leaving all 4 first cores free for your game! that’s also why ryzen is best for streamers.

  10. Ah yeah, that’s only true for now, when they actaully optmise the games for Ryzen then the performance will increase to match kaby lake… And will surpass it with newer titles when they come utilizing all 8C/16T but I don’t think this will hapen untill next year.

  11. ‘Why would game developers optimize especially for AMD…’

    because the next generation gaming consoles might well be running on AMD CPUs (& possibly GPUs too).

  12. Yeah, it is indeed a game changer. I’d say that is especially true of Bethesda Game Studios. While many Bethesda Softworks owned studios, like id Software are not so bad, BGS’s games are poorly optimised, especially for AMD CPUs anf GPUs. But that will be reversed given the work being done with AMD will be done using Vulkan, which Doom proves is a very capable API when it comes to AMD CPUs and GPUs.

    Oxide upgrading their Nitrous engine to use 8 cores/16 threads is in a way less of a big deal as the current Nitrous games, Ashes of the Singularity, already does well on Ryzen 7, even if Oxide say they can and will optimise it to do better.

    Star Citizen using 8 cores/16 threads is not surprising. That game always seemed like an extremely ambitious game that would be better suited to the “technology of the future” than stuff we had at the time. (Quotations because Ryzen and Vega/Volta are likely said future tech so said tech is either already here or coming soon).

    EDIT: A swording improvements to the first paragraph to improve clarity.