AMD CEO: Better Gaming performance Ryzen CPUs with patches

On top of this there's the Windows scheduler. It is said to have a bug in it with regards to Ryzen, and a Windows update/Windows 10 Creators Update should resolve this.

There was also talk of a AMD CPU specific driver that allows for faster frequency/voltage switching without having to select performance mode in power options (which generally would be bad). Won't make a massive gains, but you could get the idea of this by choosing Performance mode now and doing a comparative benchmark (wouldn't technically even require a restart).

Some people have shown the benefits (allegedly) of using faster RAM. CPU microcode (a module of the bios) updates should help to improve compatibility and resultant performance in regards to fast memory.

If the above three things are true, it should give a nice little bump to all things and not just gaming, which looks to possibly have further gains with optimisations with Ryzen in mind.

 

I guess what also plays a role is that over the last decade, multi threaded gaming was not the real interest to go for anyway. Games just hardly need more than four cores, and haven't been optimized for 12 threads for instance. Look at a CPU heavy game like Battlefield that still "only" uses 6 to 8 threads properly (Ryzen review video for instance).

 

Not expecting big gains. I suspect it won't be more than 5-10% better.

We'll see but these people lie for a living. Sell. Sell. Sell.

 

Of course the $ million question is how long will this take? Weeks, months or years?

 

With the work handed over to devs, it indeed is a question of million $ of worktime the devs have to put in to patching their games so that Su and AMD users are happy again... with what market share exactly? Don't see this happen too fast, but we'll see how it goes.

 

Those numbers would bring it to 6900 and maybe over

 

We'll probably see the 2-3 games support it along with the marketing campaign to go with it.

How widespread optimisation will be will depend on adoption %.

I still think this is going to work out for them AFTER Xbox Scorpio comes out. If Intel follow suit and also try and bring 8-cores to the mainstream, then, it's going to happen sooner rather than later.

However, the more cores used, the higher the latency. At the point where users can "feel" the latency is where higher IPC will be more important, rather than the number of cores. Games don't have to use all the cores to be stunning. There is still a lot more demand for gpu processing power over cpu power.

 

I completely agree. Not so sure about Scorpio bringing so much to the game for PC, but if Intel at least brings hexa cores to the mainstream segment, it would be a great thing to witness. I bought my CPU in hopes too that this will happen. Not sure if Intel plans on bringing more than quad cores to mainstream though this year or the next... will be interesting to see.

 

Same goes with games utilizing more cores Ryzen performance will get better.

 

Without doubt.

I'm suprised Ashes of the Singularity hasn't jumped on this. :nerd:

 

They are already getting breakfast in bed from AMD's team

 

Have a feeling by the time devs show promising improvements with ryzen optimizations, there may be refreshes or new SKUs, either from Intel or AMD.

 

I have been following Ryzen this weekend and although no improvement can be expected in some areas (overclock for example) there is objective evidence that suggest potentially big improvement room for games and other complex programs and some improvement room for single threaded software and memory latency (and bandwith) through software optimizations in microcode, in bios and in every program itself so they can adapt to the new architecture and take advantage of their strengths.

Edit: I think the improvements that bios, microcode and windows can bring will happen relatively fast. The ones that rely on changing software itself obviously could take a while. For the sake of everyone I hope that Intel won't be successful this time in preventing the adoption of Ryzen by messing with developers, OEMs or trusted reviewers ... Dreaming is free of course...

As a personal thought: We are talking about a new architecture in a new fabrication process with a new platform and socket in an environmet where every major software has been built and improved for Intel's hardware over years... What could go wrong? IMHO Ryzen has been truly competitive from day one, impressive in some areas and good enough in others, but competitive nonetheless. I am astonished by the accomplishments of AMD and, all things considered, also by how smooth the launch has been so far

 

I think the windows scheduler update will be a big gain, from what i read what's happening is windows doesn't see the CPU as 2 CCX's, when it removes a thread from execution and later schedules it to be executed it must execute the thread on the same CCX again, otherwise its cached data( presuming still in L2/L3 cache ) must be moved from the other CCX with a slow transfer rate of 22GBs.

Apparently Windows 7 does a much better job at scheduling on Ryzen but there aren't many benchmarks and it looks like its a pain to get windows 7 working with Ryzen.

 

It's possible Zen performs better in Windows Creators update, but nobody reliable seems to have tested it with build 15048 compared to current Windows 10. Keep in mind the Creators Update is due next month, so would better reflect what people will be using Ryzen with. Of course it might not be truly representative if the scheduler fix isn't included, but then again, it will better show the benefit of the scheduler fix versus not having it. The supposed future AMD CPU performance driver will help a bit, setting power mode to performance (don't do this as it chronically wastes power) is said to be an indicator of how the CPU performance driver will work, the difference being the performance driver won't use any more power (apart from any extra power used for increased processing capability). In fact, because of its nature it could improve power efficiency.

 

Developers optimizing engines for ryzen is not realistic in near future.

I really would love to see chipset optimization via BIOS update, windows update to improve Ryzen scheduling and hopefully Nvidia GPU drivers optimization for Ryzen this spring.

I am pretty sure this would make difference for gaming and further improve performance.

 

I have questions regarding MT in games: many are saying that if games used more than 4 cores, Ryzen would perform better, something that i agree, seems logical.
But then i start thinking about games using more cores, is it really necessary??? What if 4 cores are more than enough to drive game engines and adding more cores doesn´t bring more performance??? Or what if using more cores only adds 10 or 20% performance??? Is it worth the time and money to develop games to use more cores for small increases???

Because i´m completely in the dark about issues like this, i would really like if someone who understands about this stuff to answer this, please. And make it simple...

 

I think games are just starting to skirt the "necessity" of 4+ cores - but there are certainly examples of titles that get good scaling out of many cores. And once most of the devs have tools/engines built out of the box for 4+ core development it just becomes a no brainer to use it - which is becoming increasingly common due to both consoles having 8 cores.

There is also a chicken and egg problem a bit too - like I'm sure there are things devs would like to add crazy physics systems or whatever that would use a bunch of cores, but since the vast majority of people have 4 or less building those systems into a game wouldn't be worth the time. But now that AMD is introducing 8 core chips at like a fraction of the price, it's going to become increasingly common and it makes more sense to pursue techniques that can make use of the extra power.

 

4 cores are not endgame for gaming. 2 cores were enough 10 years ago, is it enough now? Do you like games that can utilize only single or dual core?

What was the original purpose of dual core? To be able to process different tasks at the same time. Different cores can work on different and on same software. More cores, more different tasks engine can execute at the same time. Games are evolving and become more complex, to do complex processing you need cores.