AMD responds to 1080p gaming tests on Ryzen. Supports ECC RAM. Win 10 SMT bug

[3DOSH]

AMD had few thing to say about the 1080p benchmarks and it all amount to most games are optimized for Intel, this seems likely but not the be all end all.
My thoughts are well find out in the next few months when we had time to test everything.

 

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AMD responded to the issues late last night with the following statement from John Taylor, CVP of Marketing:

“As we presented at Ryzen Tech Day, we are supporting 300+ developer kits with game development studios to optimize current and future game releases for the all-new Ryzen CPU. We are on track for 1000+ developer systems in 2017. For example, Bethesda at GDC yesterday announced its strategic relationship with AMD to optimize for Ryzen CPUs, primarily through Vulkan low-level API optimizations, for a new generation of games, DLC and VR experiences.

Oxide Games also provided a public statement today on the significant performance uplift observed when optimizing for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU design – optimizations not yet reflected in Ashes of the Singularity benchmarking. Creative Assembly, developers of the Total War series, made a similar statement today related to upcoming Ryzen optimizations.

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.

Game performance will be optimized for Ryzen and continue to improve from at-launch frame rate scores.” John Taylor, AMD

More statements from game developers: 

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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
 
"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. " – Creative Assembly, Developers of the Multi-award Winning Total War Series

Source:PCPer

 

There is AMA on the AMD sub reddit and here is some Q&A from AMD:

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Q:In some workloads SMT seems to be causing lower framerates.Have AMD seen this behaviour in testing? If so, have you identified the cause and would you be willing to share it? I'm interested in whether it's an issue with the processor, the specific software, or maybe an issue with the windows scheduler and high thread counts.Thanks for your time

A from AMD_LisaSu:Thanks for the question. In general, we've seen great performance from SMT in applications and benchmarks but there are some games that are using code optimized for our competitor... we are confident that we can work through these issues with the game developers who are actively engaging with our engineering teams.

 

 

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

A from AMD_LisaSu : 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

On ECC:

 

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Q: Hello AMD! This question is a very short one.

Do Ryzen CPUs support ECC Memory, yes or no?

A from AMD_LisaSu : Yes they do!

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Q: Could you speak to ECC being disabled in these CPUs?

A from AMD_Robert : ECC is not disabled. It works, but not validated for our consumer client platform.

Source:r/AMD

 

Bug was found in win 10 affecting Ryzen where it allocates both logical and physical cores as if they were physical cores while incorrectly guessing processor cache size.

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each zen thread is being registered as an individual core with its own L2 and L3 cache. i.e. totaling 136 MB cache!!. this is using Windows Sysinternals. This explains the SMT troubles in the event that a thread bounced to a HT thinking its the real deal.

Source:Anandtech Fourm user

 

[Mohenjo]

Ok, if its all based on how games will be optimized, I think intels huge money pool is gonna double down on getting devs to optimize for them

[tlink]

interesting, i really hope this pushes vulcan adoption further.

[Simon771]

1 minute ago, Mohenjo said:

Ok, if its all based on how games will be optimized, I think intels huge money pool is gonna double down on getting devs to optimize for them

Not sure how much further can they optimise Intel's CPUs for gaming.

 

Also keep in mind that Ryzen was just released, so a lot of applications/games will start adopting on it and trying to optimise it.

Just give Ryzen some time

[TOMPPIX]

so you have to pay the publishers now to optimize games. *sigh*

[Centurius]

Seems like a legitimate explanation.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, TOMPPIX said:

so you have to pay the publishers now to optimize games. *sigh*

Well yeah. Optimizing for a specific platform requires time and effort and a game needs to be released yesterday. If Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA wants a game publisher to delay a game to optimize for their hardware, then it makes sense they have to provide some incentive to do so.

[Dietrichw]

I would normally call BS but since there are some studios on board with bringing optimizations I'll wait and see. Might benefit X99 systems too if it makes use of more threads.

[DocSwag]

Yeah, this is what I figured. Considering that in CPU performance benchmarks the Ryzen 8 cores come close to if not beat the 5960x and 6900k, it makes sense that the Intel 8 cores' large lead compared to the Ryzen 8 cores in games is more likely to be because of bad optimization.

[LAwLz]

People said the same about Bulldozer... Never, ever ever buy anything based on future updates which may or may not increase performance. You might as well buy lottery tickets.

[Humbug]

13 minutes ago, Mohenjo said:

Ok, if its all based on how games will be optimized, I think intels huge money pool is gonna double down on getting devs to optimize for them

Oh devs will still optimize for Intel. They will be stupid not to.

 

What AMD is saying is that now devs have started also optimizing for Ryzen. Whereas in the past few years they were mostly ignoring AMD CPUs...

[Ryujin2003]

7 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

so you have to pay the publishers now to optimize games. *sigh*

Yes, that's why when you start a game it states: "Plays best with NVidia" or "Nvidia, the way games are meant to be" or whatever it says. Or how RAM has "Optimized for Intel"...

[Mohenjo]

Just now, Humbug said:

Oh devs will still optimize for Intel. They will be stupid not to.

 

What AMD is saying is that now devs have started also optimizing for Ryzen. Whereas in the past few years they were mostly ignoring AMD CPUs...

we shall see, i feel though amd is pulling at straws and ryzen just is not cut out for todays market. Hope not though. 

[pas008]

by the time this happens intel prolly will have mainstream 8c 16t cpus with better single thread performance

 

its not like they dont have the know how

[TOMPPIX]

3 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

Yes, that's why when you start a game it states: "Plays best with NVidia" or "Nvidia, the way games are meant to be" or whatever it says. Or how RAM has "Optimized for Intel"...

yeah i know that, but i never thought i would see it happen to cpus. because a cpu and a gpu are NOT the same thing.

[zMeul]

AMD blaming Intel for their poor performance in gaming .. yes, yes, what's new?

 

but wait! weren't those same compilers used for the software where Zen showed to be better than Broadwell - yeah, that's what I thought

[Curufinwe_wins]

2 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Yeah, this is what I figured. Considering that in CPU performance benchmarks the Ryzen 8 cores come close to if not beat the 5960x and 6900k, it makes sense that the Intel 8 cores' large lead compared to the Ryzen 8 cores in games is more likely to be because of bad optimization.

Well that and AMDs alu/fp units are incredibly weak compared to Intel's right now...

 

For most consumer workloads it doesn't matter (more so because of poor software optimization), but it is quite reasonable to see some bottlenecks in things that should rely heavily on that (like draw call limited gaming).

 

Also yea... Zen is NOT a HPC cpu. Unfortunately...

 

I mean it wasn't unexpected... but it is a bit disappointing to see just how much weaker it is in those workflows...

 

Still great launch by AMD for consumers.

[Humbug]

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Bethesda at GDC yesterday announced its strategic relationship with AMD to optimize for Ryzen CPUs, primarily through Vulkan low-level API optimizations, for a new generation of games, DLC and VR experiences.

Well this clearly means that Bethesda is going to start pushing the idtech engine from doom4 to their other studios.

[JuztBe]

Interesting to say the least. BUT, buying things for "potential future optimization" isn't smart decision. Hopefully we'll see at least few examples of that optimization before R5 launch. If it's actually something wait for and not few percents at best.
Maybe they'll just disable SMT in most titles /jk

[zMeul]

6 minutes ago, Humbug said:

Oh devs will still optimize for Intel. They will be stupid not to.

 

What AMD is saying is that now devs have started also optimizing for Ryzen. Whereas in the past few years they were mostly ignoring AMD CPUs...

the same compilers were used in the cases where Zen beats Broadwell, so ... hmm

[Brainless906]

9 minutes ago, zMeul said:

AMD blaming Intel for their poor performance in gaming .. yes, yes, what's new?

 

but wait! weren't those same compilers used for the software where Zen showed to be better than Broadwell - yeah, that's what I thought

I have come to the conclusion that you are legitimately just trying to make people angry with nonsensical postings at this point, and have no idea how things actually work. You provide little to no additional information to the conversation and just spout things that are anti-AMD constantly.

[ZackBarletto]

27 minutes ago, tlink said:

interesting, i really hope this pushes vulcan adoption further.

Sry just meant to agree. IDK how to remove it and add agree.

 

But i agree with you!

[3DOSH]

6 minutes ago, zMeul said:

the same compilers were used in the cases where Zen beats Broadwell, so ... hmm

 

9 minutes ago, zMeul said:

AMD blaming Intel for their poor performance in gaming .. yes, yes, what's new?

 

but wait! weren't those same compilers used for the software where Zen showed to be better than Broadwell - yeah, that's what I thought

Care to show me game using the same compiler as software benchmark ? or do you just like to come up with nonsensical reasons ?! genuine question

[3DOSH]

18 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

People said the same about Bulldozer... Never, ever ever buy anything based on future updates which may or may not increase performance. You might as well buy lottery tickets.

Exactly and for the same exact reasoning why judge product even reviewer admitted to not have enough time to test fully. Time well tell.

[Hunter259]

My lord do you guys have no idea how hard it is to multi thread things AND do it correctly where there will be a performance increase and not decrease.