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Today was the official launch day for AMD's Ryzen 7 CPUs and as you may have noticed already, plenty of reviews are now up, including our own review of the Ryzen 7 1800x. While the flagship 1800x has been deemed by many as an excellent CPU for productivity, 1080p gaming results have been less impressive when compared to Intel's mainstream Core i7s. It turns out that there is a reason for this and it all comes down to the way games have been optimised over the last few years.
Ryan Shrout over at PCPer was able to get in touch with AMD's CVP of marketing last night with an explanation as to why the Ryzen 7 1800x lags behind in 1080p gaming. The reasoning essentially boils down to developers mainly optimising games for Intel's CPUs over the last few years as AMD has been less competitive.
“CPU benchmarking deficits to the competition in certain games at 1080p resolution can be attributed to the development and optimization of the game uniquely to Intel platforms – until now. Even without optimizations in place, Ryzen delivers high, smooth frame rates on all ‘CPU-bound' games, as well as overall smooth frame rates and great experiences in GPU-bound gaming and VR. With developers taking advantage of Ryzen architecture and the extra cores and threads, we expect benchmarks to only get better, and enable Ryzen excel at next generation gaming experiences as well.”
With that in mind, AMD expects game performance for Ryzen to continue to improve over time as new games get released and old games get additional optimisation tweaks. This is why AMD has been making partnerships with studios like Bethesda, to ensure popular games are properly tuned to make proper use of Ryzen going forward.
KitGuru Says: It was odd to see the Ryzen 1800x beating Intel in so many areas only to falter in games at 1080p resolution. However, as noted in our review, Ryzen does have plenty of power ‘in reserve' for additional tasks, so it seems perhaps games just aren't tapping into Ryzen's full potential just yet. It will be interesting to see how much that changes over the next year.
Yep this is what I was thinking when looking at the reviews how can a CPU that beats intel in most benchmarks then lose in some of the games. I also noticed that the Ryzen does differently from review to review in the game tests it all boils down to how the system was setup and the mainboard used to do the tests.
I think when I see the tests done this CPU has a lot to offer and also what AMD said here does make a lot of sense about optimized code for Intel CPU’s because lets face it Intel has rules the roost for the last few years so it goes without saying the game code would be optimized for Intel. Those that say well a lot of these games are also on the PS4 and Xbone so they should be optimized for AMD already. What I say to that is PS4 and Xbone do not have Ryzen in them they actually have the older AMD core Arch which has nothing to do with Ryzen at all.
I am hoping to see either firmware bios updates that fix the latency issues some site have noticed as well as Windows OS updates and AMD CPU driver update that will enhance the performance in some of the games they lagged in a bit. I am sure this CPU has the grunt to keep pace with Intel but only time will tell I guess.
I am still planning on getting a new gaming Ryzen system built but I had already planned on waiting until this fall to pull the trigger and get the new setup because I want the whole meal deal new Ryzen and RX Vega all at once. I am sure that by this time we will be on new revised board or second release boards or just bios updates to fix the current teething problems of the new platform. If not I will wait for Ryzen 2 my old i7 3770K @ 4.7Ghz is still doing just fine for now.
I have been watching many reviews too and saw some strange variations. I do honestly believe it is a high end cpu and that news softwares should take advantage of the ryzen codes.
Who buys a high end 8 core to play a damn game at 1080p?
A lot of people plays 1080p 144hz using HEDT, specially now with 34″ 2560×1080
Also, as AdoredTV said the BIOSes are still new and not as optimal as for older CPUs (both from Intel and AMD) which is to be expected for a brand new architecture with massive changes. Motherboard manufacturers will no doubt update their BIOSes for better Ryzen performance over the next few months as they get a better idea of how Ryzen works.
EDIT: As BIOSes improve I expect compute performance to get at least minor boosts in performance as well not just gaming.
34″ 2560×1080 144hz ips* lol
I dunno, maybe people who uses the same PC for work and gaming?
I don’t see a problem.. We all knew Intel would have the most optimal code paths since game companies have been working more on GPU optimization while using Intel for test boxes… Now it’ll be more than worth it to optimize for Ryzen going forward…
It’s clear that’s the issue as some games improve when turning off SMT…
AMD: let’s blame Intel for our incompetence! Ryzen was nothing but hype.
They would be fair to blame Intel in the past. In fact it was so fair it became legally binding and Intel had to pay AMD millions for harsh anti-competitive tactics.
Shrug, artificial benchmarks showed the IPC is there. And not like it was incredibly behind intel in CPU bound gaming. Or do you really need to be running at 270fps in CSGO?
and even with all those millions of $ and all the time on their hands and all this hype, AMD still created something that can only compete with haswell but is behind skylake and kabylake… at least when it comes to gaming. All I care (majority probably) is gaming.
Pro’s
but are you part of the new generation who might also want to try streaming while gaming? if so, Ryzens new architecture and extra cores will certainly do better. We need to wait till we get some reviewers who can show us the real use cases for these 8-core chips. The truth is that there is still less than 5% of gamers out there who have more than 6 cores (based on steam) but soon that will change. For sure if you only game then intels high clocked quads will be the best.
Its a whole new architecture, it is bound to have some issues at first… but as a new architecture i bet it have a huge improvements potential… Zen+ will have more performance improvements than intel had from generation to generation.
If I’m going to professionally stream, I’m going to have a dedicated rig for pulling the content from my gaming rig. Sure, maybe that’d be Ryzen… but this launch is rather yawn inducing compared to the hype it had behind it.
Their own extreme edition i7 can’t even beat mainstream i7 in gaming, atleast amd is back in competition and a sandy bridge era from amd. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fc897e4d43085cfffc7ccbc0662a0ca6bd8da71bd5e32a602708e0f33ad27c2e.jpg
2560×1080 isn’t 1080p, 1080p is 1920×1080. That’s 691,200 more pixels to push which shifts the burden onto the GPU. Nor is ultra-wide a common display. His point is valid. Nobody in their right mind who can shell out $500 on a CPU is going to have a dingy 1080p display. It’s a completely unbalanced system.
Pro’s at what? Having a hopelessly outdated display and an unbalanced system?
Why have two separate machines when one machine will do the same job at a fraction of the cost? Especially since the two machine setup is going to mean sacrificing adaptive sync. Plus this is literally day 1, every new leap in technology inevitably has teething problems. And this is just one specific edge case that there’s a minor loss of framerate, 1080p gaming. Oh wow, so bad, it does a little worse in a woefully outdated resolution. Back to the drawing board, lads!
Your missing the point. Testing them at 1080p ensures that CPU performances are tested, not GPU bottleneck. When the next generation of graphics cards drop, it might be possible to test CPUs at higher resolutions such as 4K, but right now it’s not possible.
To be fair, Ryzen is a monster for productivity. It is disappointing for gaming but if you want to build a workstation, I would say it’s a very good choice. This will especially be true when multi-CPU motherboards start to hit the market. Also there seems to be a lot of issues with the Bios of most motherboards, so once Bios revisions start rolling out the overall performance spectrum might change. I think we need to let the platform mature a little before deciding if it is good or not for gaming. I wanted to build a system ASAP but now I will wait for revisions to come out.
Anyone that sees a high end 8 core at the price of a Intel 4 core.
What if the lower end 1600x and 1500x also have this problem? This excuse won’t work then. Ryzen is great and all, but it’s not a good deal for gamers.
Guys that want to play on high refresh rate monitors. Usually people that are playing FPS competitive or other competitive games like myself. 144Hz is the meta when it comes to FPS games, and it’s only getting better and better.
Hang on the frames per second are quite close in most cases.
All the consoles are AMD 8 Core. (I know jaguar cores)
I would prefer more cores than an extra 5-15 FPS as future proofing. If you record video, stream or encode, 8 core ryzen is a no brainer @ the price.
Intel is switching to more cores in its new mainstream processors that are coming down the line.
Granted if you have a fairly new INTEL CPU it obviously wouldn’t be 4 u.
I for 1 am adding a ryzen build to my.
Also if you are gaming at 1080p, thats just bonkers complaining about RYZEN. Should be going for new monitor/video card first.
G, guys, thanks for the obvious. Also those pros are already sponsored by whoever pays the bills, and those who are not already are sitting with 5ghz 7700ks. The message here is, if you want a high end CPU for 1440p+ gaming and heavy work, plus streaming Ryzen is perfect for you. If Intel did not advertise their HEDT as such that doesn’t mean the market doesn’t exist. Where were all of you when Intel’s HEDT was launched and was slower in gaming from normal chips? None of you could afford one, now we have cheap chips from AMD which are murdering everything except small pro gamer market and you all suddenly come out of the woodworks and start stating the obvious.
By the way I’m not having a dig at Kitguru Ryzen review, you guys were the one of few who actually took Ryzen for what it is 😉
I am 1080p 144hz 1ms…. it’s okay for me! I do not need it want anymore as I am happy with 1080p until games start looking like Pixar movies…. there is no point for me
Actually I know a few people who use an asus PG258Q 240hz 1080p screen and they are using overclocked GTX1080’s. It might be uncommon, but it certainly does happen.
At least Daniel gets it!
Go argue with LG
http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-34UC79G-B-ultrawide-monitor
34″ Class 21:9 UltraWide® Full HD IPS Curved
And i know more people using 1080 with 1080p then other resolutions.
That’s true what AMD said. Game logic is quite complex, and cannot be easily destributed among cores, like in cinebench or handbrake. Best way to get higher performance is to optimize code for given CPU architecture. But downside is that such optimised code is pretty inefficient on other architecture.
Ryzen is great for those who want to stream games. Without these additional cores, gamers must lower quality, which is more devastating for FPS and image quality than Ryzen
People who see it for the bargain it is.
Have you seen the FPS numbers? They are all in 100s. It’s not like Ryzen does 75fps and the rest are doing 140fps.
There isn’t any question in terms of raw power, Ryzen is capable of destroying Intel’s current offerings on all fronts. However, it has the same Achilles Heel as Bulldozer, in that it relies on a heavy core/thread count, while most software will only use 1-4 threads. Hopefully AMD has learned from Bulldozer, and will work with developers more closely, offering open source software and dev kits optimized for Ryzen. This looks to be to the case already, since AMD has already announced their partnership with Bethesda.
At 1440p, the resolution I play at, the difference between the 1800X and 6900K is unnoticeable. The 7700K still consistently takes the lead, but not by a wide margin. It’s only in CPU-bound instances where Ryzen is falling short. There are people that buy GTX 1080’s for 1080p gaming, but I’m not one of them. I own an R9 Fury and play at 1440p with an i5-4670K. I am not CPU-bound. So yes, if you play Watch Dogs 2 at 1080p and have a 144Hz panel with a GTX 1080 or higher and don’t stream or do anything other than game, don’t buy Ryzen 7. It’s a poor choice. But if you play at 1440p or higher, want to support AMD’s more cost-effective platform and not Intel’s shady practises, hope to scale well in the future, stream, create any content or edit detail laden files, Ryzen 7 is either a better or equal option.
The question is: will the situation improve?
Unless people buy A LOT of $500 Ryzen 1800X CPUs which scores a lot lower, especially in DX12 games instead of the $350 7700k, what would be the incentive of the software developers to optimize for AMD more than today?
I play games at 1920×1080.. and while I care more about single core performance considering games are still moving towards using more cores then a 8 core CPU is welcome (I hope the Ryzen 1600/1500 will be good for me)
I’m interested in a new monitor and been told 144Hz is a must but that’s not double the fps minimum I was looking and I doubt a RX480 will manage that at 1080p 🙁
Just a random lurker, saw the comment and had to add, think more about the $330 Ryzen 1700 w/ wraith ($30ish) 100$ cheapest mobo vs $350 7700K no cooler and cheapest mobo around $150 I believe could be wrong. Ryzen you are getting around 50% more work power for content creation and streaming, on top of future proofing your rig which I guarantee WILL happen, vulkan is already a thing. If you ONLY game then sure go with 7700K and when games use more than 4 cores you will suffer, how much is debatable but it will make a difference.
that and many reasons for such, not enough space for a massive monitor, cant justify cost increase at time of purchase, the pixel pitch not always making the higher res monitors quality as “good” as the lower ones, I know for myself, 1080p is sweet spot, cause when scale resolution, some things such as text in some games or the way it “looks” makes much harder to see everything, sure it more clear and defined, but sometimes things appear zoomed out and tiny then they would normally appear on a lower resolution.
Alas they do and should test low and high resolutions to accommodate as many scenarios as possible, not every game loads the gpu heavy as other games even when at high resolution, and other games even if low resolution may not load the cpu as heavy, hence need many tests over as many scenarios as possible.
It is a brand new platform, will have own issues and subtleties need to work out, AMD will do as best they can am sure of that, it will just take them a bit more time then it would take their multi billion $ funded competitors. even they have issues, crap solder/TIM, thin dies to save $, poor component selection causing failures where there should not be etc.
Software takes years to develop, and I don’t think developers had a few months extra against many of us, so it’ll be a while.
This isn’t about compatible software, this is about programs being CPU-heavy Vs GPU-heavy. It’s been a law of the jungle, so to speak, over the last decade that games at high resolution and details put more weight on graphics cards. Yet people expect more CPU cores to mean something.
To expect that a Broadwell-E equivalent 8-core to do magic against a faster quad-core Skylake or Kaby Lake is a failure of logic. Everyone knocking Ryzen for not beating Kaby Lake is guilty of not seeing where the load of improvement is based on.
The only reason Ryzen 7 loses is due to low base, turbo, and overclock frequencies. It’s a scenario no different than how Broadwell-E stacks. Gaming just happens to favor less cores at a higher frequency.
Doesn’t make any sense. You had a $500 CPU and a $600+ video card just to play games at 1080p?!
AMD Ryzen 8% behind Kapy-Lake in IPC and 12%behind Kapy-Lake in clock speed.
That’s mean 20% Delta behind Kapy-Lake in single core performance.
*These information from AMD not from my pocket*
Coffee-Lake should as usual bring 5% in IPC 10% in IGPU 15% in total , that’s mean Ryzen will be 25~30% Delta behind Coffee-Lake single core performance and that’s huge deal in games.
Coffee-Lake also will bring 6C/12T and
24~30 PCI-E3.0 lanes to mainstream, plus the IGPU will support 4K HD10, Dolby Vision [H.265 ,Vp9 4K 12bit Encode and Decode].
AMD did great job with Ryzen but they have a lot of work to do with Zen2.
First they have to close the IPC gab between Zen and Coffee-Lake (10% higher IPC will be really good news).
Second they have to close the gap between Zen and Coffee-Lake in clock speed (10% will be amazing)
[That’s will but Zen2 just 8~10% Delta behind Coffee-Lake in single core performance] .
Third they have to add the missing features from Zen architecture like AVX256, 28~40 PCI-E 3.0 lanes.
Fourth they have to fix memory bandwidth issue from what AMD said it’s look like they will not add Quad channel memory anytime soon, but they can increase the bandwidth buy supporting higher RAM speed out of the box 3200 MHz with two Dimm slots and 2699 MHz with Four Dimm slots that’s will bring huge improvements to the performance plus support RAM OC up to 4000 MHz.
AMD have to do that next year to close the gap because in 2019 Intel will release Ice-Lake with new architecture using 10nm, we will see at least 10% higher IPC than Coffee-Lake, that’s will but Ryzen 40% Delta behind Ice-Lake in single core performance, just in two years With support for DDR5 and DDR4, PCI-Express 4.0, and many other features, not to mention Optan X will be available for consumers.
In 2019 AMD should release Zen3 on 7nm FinFET not on 14nm FinFET and add all the features from Ice-Lake and keep the 5~8% Delta behind Intel in single core performance.
AMD also have two years to work with games developer to support Ryzen 8C/16SMT, 6C/12SMT maybe also 12C/24SMT to make sure First generation Ryzen will not be end up 40% behind Intel Ice-Lake in games, that’s possible specialy if Xbox Scorpio will end up using Ryzen CPU that’s will help AMD a lot in optimization issues.
[if AMD will not bring down the 40% Delta gab in performance between Ryzen and Ice-Lake, most of the people will jump in Intel train and will never go back to AMD train even if they will offer Quantum computer for free for each person bought Ryzen in 2017-2018].
We know also Tiger-Lake in 2021 will be the last Intel (Cor I7,I5,I3) architecture after that they will move to new architecture from the ground, AMD have a lot of work to do to keep up with Intel.
AMD APU’s before end of the year should give us big example about how AMD will fix the RAM bandwidth issues, if they will use HBM2 to feed the CPU and GPU they should do that with Zen 2 as L4 cash to avoid all the problems from RAM speed, timing and channels.
If they will use DDR4 Dual channel memory to feed the APU, like what they did with old APU’s and DDR3 single channel and dual channel it will be epic fail to AMD in performance. Buy the way AMD APU’s still better than Intel IGPU but both suffered from RAM bandwidth limitations, Intel still has the problem.
Coming months will give us some answers about next Zen architecture. [Just hope it’s good not bad].
Some people want to have high refresh rates for their high refresh rate monitors. The higher the resolution the harder that is with a single GPU. His point is invalid, most points are invalid (unless really crazy) cause there are various types of people.
I’m sure lots. Especially with these low prices don’t you think budget gamers (not completely low budget) are itching to get a 8-Core HEDT. Then there will be a upgrade to GPU and Monitor
“Ryzen does have plenty of power ‘in reserve’ for additional tasks, so it seems perhaps games just aren’t tapping into Ryzen’s full potential just yet.”
We already knew this from Intel 6+ core gaming benchmarks. The consumer 4C/8T i7’s have always been the enthusiast gamers’ choice. AMD used so many cores, because they didn’t have the frequency.
Here is the proof of lack of optimisation from most of game devs: http://techreport.com/review/31366/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-ryzen-7-1700x-and-ryzen-7-1700-cpus-reviewed/7
Crysis 3, maybe the best game in both GPU and CPU utilization works fine for all high performance CPUs.
Ryzen is on par with the 7700k and 6900k for the vast majority of user experiences and will likely remain so for it’s “life time”, yes even gaming. It also doesn’t have to be the “best” to be good at something. Combine that with it’s workstation performance and it’s a fantastic chip for the price.
All this nonsense about how the 7700k will keep up with faster gpus as you upgrade is a red herring. Unless you plan on Not upgrading the cpu for like 6ish+ years, while regularly upgrading your GPU, not upgrading your monitor, games not becoming more multi threaded, games not becoming more demanding on gpus.
The users who want/need 144fps or higher minimum are a minority.
No offense, but what kind of person buys an 8 core 1800x and uses it for 1080p gaming? I ordered an 1800x, but for content creation and SOME gaming, but in 4K. I would expect anyone buying a $500 8core CPU would at least be gaming in 1440p, after all, who would buy a $500 CPU to game on a $100 monitor?
how can you honestly say that?
I agree that the Ryzen platform is a good overall chip as it is. We will know it’s true performance and potential once Bios updates start rolling out and they fix the bugs related to memory and performance. As for it being slower for games, I disagree with you. Games for most home users are the most demanding task they will need a fast CPU for. While I do some video editing, I game a lot more. So if I have to choose between waiting a bit more when I render a video and have better gaming performance, for me at least gaming comes first. As for upgrading the system, since 2011 I have not upgraded my CPU but upgraded my GPU twice. I usually go for performance mid-tier cards such as the GTX 970. I doubt that will change in the future, Ever since I switched from Amiga to PC about 20 years ago, I have upgraded graphic cards far more often than CPUs, For me the next big step is virtual reality and I have no idea what requirements will be needed to keep up with that. All I know is that right now my system can’t do it and when I decide to build my new computer it will be an entry level system for VR. At the moment top of the line GPUs are the bare minimum, and I am not sure how much headroom current CPUs have when it comes to VR because nobody is doing VR benchmarks for reasons that escape my comprehension.
Ryzen in Australia is just not worth the price right now for gaming as a 7700K is much better value for money compared to any of AMD’s offerings based on current performance.
All Pro´s care about is Frame Per Second. Most play at 720p to ensure no drops below 240Hz.
AND looking to a 23″ monitor, 720p is really not that different from 1080p… and 4K looks like a waste.
AMD is inferior as usual.
If they ever make a processor which is actually better for gaming then sure, I’ll buy it.
Until then there is no point.
True but in my own testing I had a lot of screen tear and stuttering compared to my i5 Haswell sharing as many of the same parts as possible. I was benching so had V-sync off.
If you overclock as hard as you can on air the Ryzen is just slightly better than an AMD FX. I benched Heaven at 1080p, the i5 was about 12% quicker than the 1700x, the 1700x about 2.5% quicker than the FX6300. All 3 had ROG motherboards, I was getting the 3200mhz max possible mem speed for the Ryzen and they all had a Noctua NH15 cooler with triple fans.
I never tested crossfire before RMA of the Ryzen but on Firestrike Ultra 4K bench the FX6300 is up to 50% faster than my i5 due to x16 PCIe with 2 cards.
For 1080p gaming a 7700K is king, for 4K I’d go X99 chipset, 2 graphics cards and a 6800K which costs the same as an average Ryzen.
Check out http://hwbot.org/ if you want all the figures and table of what various hardware configurations are capable of. Apart from on LN2 cooling Ryzen is nowhere in any category on any bench.
The best in the world are unable to extract decent performance from it on air or water so what chance does a normal user have??
They get all the best kit, latest updates and are sponsored so there is nowhere to hide.
If you are a pro there is still only Intel, you can claim the extra costs back against tax anyway and won’t need to update your bios every other day risking a bricked board.
It’s not the Ram speed so much that is the problem but the slow unadjustable memory controller. It is tied to RAM speed so 3200mhz ram gives a very slow 1600mhz northbridge.
The only reason I can see for doing that is that the controller is weak, it’s the first thing that usually breaks on a CPU if you overclock too far.
With all the texture mods and everything cranked up to the max it would make sense to ensure no dropped frames ever.
It does if you crossfire & run 4K
Who buys 8 cores to do word, watching video and browse Internet?
Those are the MLG try hards. 😀
And the final point of that is? I realky never understood why gamers aim for bottlenecks if u can play gpu bound lol….
I thought screen tearing is only when your FPS is lower than your monitor’s refresh rate? So how is that possible?
6 months in and the memory speed issues with some Ryzen boards still persist. 6 months is definitely out of the “teething” stage.
Also, using a second rig does not disable adaptive sync as I have that setup and the second rig captures video from a second display port on the gaming rig. The gaming rig is set to mirror displays, my primary display is a 2K 144Hz with G-Sync. I get G-Sync’d gaming while I stream/record (note, I’m not saying the stream/recording is G-Sync’d of course.)
The purpose of a second rig is to offload encoding from your gaming rig onto the second rigs cpu completely. As for 1080p, while I don’t game in it any longer, 1080p media consumption, especially on sites like Twitch, is still the reigning champ.
(Note: figured I’d take a moment to respond after all this time because I came back across this looking at my notifications. Funny how even after this long, the few AMD loving friends I had are still struggling with non-standard DDR4 speed ram after multiple bios updates. Full disclosure, I am buying a threadripper rig next year with base speed ram for my streaming setup)
People that are not made of money and can not upgrade thier computer all at once. Got the 1800x for $360 new. Dx12 and volken can make use of as many threads as any given cpu has. AMD just made 8 cores mainstream, more game developers are going to be programming games for more cores. I got the 1800x so my system would last longer. I7 980x to an 1800x not a bad upgrade. I still run r9 290x cards in crossfire. I Will get a better card and moniter down the road. But for now I still run games in eyefinity 3 1080p moniters.
Me
That all changed with AC: Origins and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
Pull down. It happens when your monitor Rephreshes slower than your GPU output as well. That’s why V-Sync and G-Sync exist as well. They are essentially timers to keep the rates constant.
Higher CPU core do mean something if the game (or any software) is designed to break down it’s compute into separately threadable parts. How since most game engines are designed to work on Intel CPUs till now, they don’t do that yet. Also most engines are cross platform and need to be designed to work on consoles as well.
Now that Intel is doing more cores as well, I expect big improvements in next gen games which will be designed for future consoles and high core count PCs. A current gen Ryzen will keep up over the next 4 years at least if not more.
BULLSHIT! It’s NOT because of optimization, it’s because of the slow IPC and shitty Clock Speeds. 4Ghz MAX? LOL!