Why does Ryzen gaming performance matter?

[Enderman]

31 minutes ago, He_162 said:

I have, and I have seen inconsistent results left and right, with optimizations made, the results are within 5% of intel's, and with the worst being 30% worse.

The thing is, the worst results were stable framerates in the most taxing games, with no visible lag or stuttering, even while streaming.

No, clearly you don't understand the difference between "gamer" and "content creator"....

[Godlygamer23]

One issue with having a CPU that's less powerful than another, and one that's less useful at lower resolutions(in this case 1080p) means that it will bottleneck higher end video cards made in the future at resolutions that will effectively become the same as 1080p. I don't want to hear the argument that the chips are not "designed for gaming" as the 1800X is clocked at 3.6GHz base, and 4GHz turbo. Ryzen simply lacks the IPC to compete with Intel's architectures in video games, and while it's great in a lot of benches, it also loses a lot in video games, and this isn't even limited to 1080p. The performance is lesser at 1440p as well.

 

I've heard people say that if it doesn't dip below 60FPS, what's the problem? The problem is I, and a few others, game at 1080p144, and therefore need a CPU that can sufficiently feed the GPU at all times, which doesn't exist, but we can narrow that bottleneck as much as possible. 

[Ithanul]

28 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

They were expecting the "dream gaming pc of 2017", as that's how Lisa Su marketed claimed it would be. (For workstation/streaming use, it is extremely good)

Then only thing I can say.  Dumb butts for believing marketing with no foundation behind it.

 

If one thing to know with businesses, they will spit out crap to sell stuff no matter who it is.  And seriously, going off the word of that person is asking to be disappointed.  I mean, what do you expect to come out of the mouth of CEO over a company.  They are like politicians.  Their words are crap.

[79wjd]

2 minutes ago, Ithanul said:

Then, then only thing I can say.  Dumb butts for believing marketing with no foundation behind it.

 

If one thing to know with businesses, they will spit out crap to sell stuff no matter who it is.  And seriously, going off the word of that person is asking to be disappointed.  I mean, what do you expect to come out of the mouth of CEO over a company.  They are like politicians.  Their words are crap.

No doubt, but that's still the reason why a lot of people were disappointed with Ryzen. AMD overhyped it and Ryzen simply couldn't live up to expectations. 

 

It's an excellent workstation/streaming CPU, and completely undermines X99 for all but the highest end rigs (that need >24 PCIE lanes or quad channel memory), but for gaming a 6700k/7700k is better.

[Nena Trinity]

Even a Pentium can do 60fps in most cases, a i3 or FX-6300 in even more cases & Ryzen will probably be overkill unless you aim for 144fps?

[He_162]

17 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

One issue with having a CPU that's less powerful than another, and one that's less useful at lower resolutions(in this case 1080p) means that it will bottleneck higher end video cards made in the future at resolutions that will effectively become the same as 1080p. I don't want to hear the argument that the chips are not "designed for gaming" as the 1800X is clocked at 3.6GHz base, and 4GHz turbo. Ryzen simply lacks the IPC to compete with Intel's architectures in video games, and while it's great in a lot of benches, it also loses a lot in video games, and this isn't even limited to 1080p. The performance is lesser at 1440p as well.

 

I've heard people say that if it doesn't dip below 60FPS, what's the problem? The problem is I, and a few others, game at 1080p144, and therefore need a CPU that can sufficiently feed the GPU at all times, which doesn't exist, but we can narrow that bottleneck as much as possible. 

So if it doesn't exist, then why not go with the cheaper option at the moment, AMD?

Also, since windows assumes that threads have their own cache like actual cores do, we can assume it will increase it's performance quite soon, with bios updates, windows updates, and optimizations to drivers.

[He_162]

17 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

No doubt, but that's still the reason why a lot of people were disappointed with Ryzen. AMD overhyped it and Ryzen simply couldn't live up to expectations. 

 

It's an excellent workstation/streaming CPU, and completely undermines X99 for all but the highest end rigs (that need >24 PCIE lanes or quad channel memory), but for gaming a 6700k/7700k is better.

They get better performance in some games, and worse in others, that isn't better.

 

They have better single core performance, and IPC, which we can expect to not last long compared to having more cores, games will become optimized for the higher core count in the future, this is just like the move from 2 core to 4 core gaming.

[He_162]

17 hours ago, Nena360 said:

Even a Pentium can do 60fps in most cases, a i3 or FX-6300 in even more cases & Ryzen will probably be overkill unless you aim for 144fps?

Neither of those will run at 60 FPS with a GTX 1080 Ti in 1440p, or 4k gaming, and in 1080p the results would be about half that of Ryzen's performance (Pentium as well as FX series.) The overclockable i3 being the only exception, it might see a 15% improvement in gaming performance due to IPC and overclocking over the pentium.

[Godlygamer23]

5 minutes ago, He_162 said:

So if it doesn't exist, then why not go with the cheaper option at the moment, AMD?

The Intel equivalent offering might give better performance for the money, and you might still get a higher frame rate, which would be beneficial for people who game at higher than 60Hz. 

[He_162]

24 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

The Intel equivalent offering might give better performance for the money, and you might still get a higher frame rate, which would be beneficial for people who game at higher than 60Hz. 

But it doesn't give better performance for the money in anything but PURE gaming, so if that's all you want to do, you can get the i5-7600K, it's cheaper still, and runs games just as well.

 

(probably a 10 FPS difference in minimum FPS, but within 5fps of average frames of most games, excluding Arma 3, and Arma 2, due to their being VERY cpu intensive.)

 

Now that we have solved that issue, I would like to remind everyone that was not the main topic of this thread, I would like to get back to why the R7 1700 is superior to the i7-7700K in every other aspect besides gaming performance, and I mean every aspect.

 

(By every aspect, I am defining performance over all cores and threads, and in realistic usage as a content creator, or someone who actually needs those cores.)

[App4that]

42 minutes ago, He_162 said:

But it doesn't give better performance for the money in anything but PURE gaming, so if that's all you want to do, you can get the i5-7600K, it's cheaper still, and runs games just as well.

 

(probably a 10 FPS difference in minimum FPS, but within 5fps of average frames of most games, excluding Arma 3, and Arma 2, due to their being VERY cpu intensive.)

 

Now that we have solved that issue, I would like to remind everyone that was not the main topic of this thread, I would like to get back to why the R7 1700 is superior to the i7-7700K in every other aspect besides gaming performance, and I mean every aspect.

 

(By every aspect, I am defining performance over all cores and threads, and in realistic usage as a content creator, or someone who actually needs those cores.)

But the topic title is why gaming matters. So if you're not gaming, then the question is silly. If you're gaming, it matters. 

[killcomic]

21 hours ago, He_162 said:

Actually, those stats are off a bit, it performs better when it has the bios updates it needs, not prelaunch bios microcode.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-11.html

 

Also, there is a huge discussion going on, and we have found out, a 144hz monitor is really the highest refresh rate you need for gaming, unless you professionally play CS:GO, in which case, an i5, or locked i7 is all you need, and generally, they don't care about what processor it is unless it has high single thread performance, which the i7 offers, sure, but that's very few people.

Ryzen will appeal to almost all of the consumers looking for a 300 - 400$ processor, that performs well in games, is the best price / $ they can get, and offers the same performance, better, or slightly worse in gaming as an i7.

 

You just cannot win, can you?

 

If your intention is high end gaming, you will want the best you can get, and since Ryzen is the best you can get in terms of a cheap, but great processor, it's what you should get.

 

The i7 will no doubt, improve on those framerates, but it will not improve in the quality of your gameplay, as it will not be noticeable, and it's just silly, it's a 4 core processor, and they need to die, 8 core is the way to go, more cores is worth it in the long run, and if I ever see a i7 performing as well as a R7 1700 in 5 - 6 years, I will send you a message apologizing, sadly for you, I doubt you will ever see it in your inbox.

 

 

Dude, my i5 3570k performs better than Ryzen in gaming. Why would I 'upgrade' to something that performs worse.

And yes, it will affect the quality of gameplay. My i5 3570k is already chugging at some games. Ryzen would not alleviate the situation.

As games become more demanding, guess what CPU will need replacement first?

Also, the more cores argument a future proofing did no favours to the Excavator architecture.

Really, does your mum own AMD or something? You reek of desperate fanboy.

[79wjd]

23 minutes ago, killcomic said:

Dude, my i5 3570k performs better than Ryzen in gaming. Why would I 'upgrade' to something that performs worse.

And yes, it will affect the quality of gameplay. My i5 3570k is already chugging at some games. Ryzen would not alleviate the situation.

As games become more demanding, guess what CPU will need replacement first?

Also, the more cores argument a future proofing did no favours to the Excavator architecture.

Really, does your mum own AMD or something? You reek of desperate fanboy.

In fairness, there's a better chance that games become better multi-threaded now than there was five years ago -- at this point I would personally gamble on a 1700, although, as I said, it is still a gamble (for gaming).

[killcomic]

9 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

In fairness, there's a better chance that games become better multi-threaded now than there was five years ago -- at this point I would personally gamble on a 1700, although, as I said, it is still a gamble (for gaming).

A HUGE gamble.
Frankly, when the PS4 and XBOX One came out, it should have heralded the age of heavily multi-threaded games, but nope. It hasn't happened. And the odds of any current CPU (Ryzen or i7) being relevant when they finally do, I would imagine is quite slim.

[App4that]

The problem is people are trying to make Ryzen what it's not, yet.

 

The R7 Ryzen CPUs are workstation CPUs, not gaming CPUs. A 1700x will chop the head off a 6850k and **** down it's neck in workstation tasks. That's a good thing. Wait 6 months and see if a 6600k can still beat the 1700x. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Not worth arguing over. 

[App4that]

4 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

The Intel equivalent offering might give better performance for the money, and you might still get a higher frame rate, which would be beneficial for people who game at higher than 60Hz. 

This comment is troubling. This is the trap being laid by the media that has people who don't do anything but game buying a CPU that isn't a good price to performance option. 

 

People upgrade. You want your CPU to last at least a few years while you do. No one should have to buy a CPU less than a year old to feed a new monitor. 

[Nena Trinity]

11 hours ago, He_162 said:

Neither of those will run at 60 FPS with a GTX 1080 Ti in 1440p, or 4k gaming, and in 1080p the results would be about half that of Ryzen's performance (Pentium as well as FX series.) The overclockable i3 being the only exception, it might see a 15% improvement in gaming performance due to IPC and overclocking over the pentium.

Have you tried?

[daniellearmouth]

On 07/03/2017 at 5:33 AM, Godlygamer23 said:

Ryzen simply lacks the IPC to compete with Intel's architectures in video games...

Uhh, a CPU doesn't suddenly lose IPC for one thing and have it for another. That's not how CPUs work.

A simple explanation as to why this is the case is because if you look at benchmarks for anything that isn't gaming, you notice that it for the most part keeps on par with the 6900K, or at worst is only a few percent behind, especially in multi-threaded workloads. There's no hardware reason why, in games, this should be happening. Except for one thing...the architecture itself.

 

You see, Zen is an architecture that is built from the ground up over a period of around five years. For the last few months of its announcement, motherboard vendors and game developers, among others, have been in somewhat of a frantic rush to make this a decent enough launch for Ryzen, and whilst they haven't completely succeeded since games don't run as good as Intel runs them, it's still doing quite well.

By comparison, Intel have been sitting on the same basic architecture for the last ten years with a few changes and modifications to the architecture to improve performance. I'm grossly oversimplifying it on the side of Intel, but the point is, there has been negligible difference on Intel's side for the last five years, and the last quantum leap for them in performance - Sandy Bridge - is still being used by some folks who would traditionally buy a new CPU after a year or two of use, simply because it was the performance king of its day, and it did just that from the very first day, because the Core-based architecture already had most of the optimisations it would need.

 

All it really comes down to is the one word I seem to have been spouting outside of this forum for the last few weeks - optimisation. Ryzen, quite simply, is not optimised for games yet. YET. AMD have announced at GDC they're sending developers kits complete with Ryzen hardware to allow for them to optimise their games for the architecture.

Not to mention, for the past few years the Bulldozer architecture hasn't been able to hold a candle to Sandy Bridge in pretty much anything, and in gaming it has enjoyed between 5 to 15% performance increase...until this year.

You see, when it came to modernising their benchmarks, Computer Base - a German computer journal - got a bunch of CPUs and put them in a system with a Pascal-based GTX Titan X, and it showed something rather significant. On average, the FX-8370, an eight-core CPU running on Piledriver, outperforms the i5-2500K in gaming. Not all games, as there are several in which it is slower, but on the whole, the FX-8370 has shown to us one significant development - a move towards optimising for more cores and threads, over greater single core performance.

 

It's somewhat of a hollow achievement in that an eight-core butt-of-all-jokes CPU beats a legendary i5 in gaming, but at the same time, with things like Mantle (R.I.P.), DirectX 12 and Vulkan, games are now seeing a need for more cores to divide the workload, as opposed to being on one or two. It's also important to note that so far, there are only so many DirectX 12 titles, Mantle is dead in the water, but lives on in Vulkan which has even fewer games than DX12.

But with DirectX 12 installed on every Windows 10 device, and Vulkan on...pretty much everything at this point, we can expect games to start utilise core counts over core performance. And from that, we can expect to see an increase in performance in Ryzen 7 on the whole.

 

OK, so I'm probably missing something significant here, but I'm starting to ramble here, so...

In summary, Ryzen is currently not optimised for games. AMD got ahead of themselves by marketing it as a gaming CPU at this time. However, with the move to DirectX 12 and Vulkan comes a chance for AMD to have games optimised for their CPUs. There's nothing in the hardware that makes it perform great in one thing and terrible in another - it just comes down to how games have been programmed for the last few years.

This is not intended to pardon AMD as their marketing of a superlative gaming CPU is not true at this time, but if AMD spend the next year or so getting some optimisations done, get some newer motherboards out with better components, and spend some time refining the architecture, AMD could have a winner here. It just depends on whether or not AMD take this optimisation stuff seriously.

[Godlygamer23]

13 minutes ago, daniellearmouth said:

Uhh, a CPU doesn't suddenly lose IPC for one thing and have it for another. That's not how CPUs work.

Anandtech had this to say on IPC with regards to code optimization for Intel CPUs:

If anyone thinks this is ‘unfair’, it begs a bigger question as to how IPC is a good measure of performance if the code is IPC limiting itself, which is a topic for another day.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-review-a-deep-dive-on-1800x-1700x-and-1700

 

And while you may be right about the optimization, compared to Intel CPUs, its per-core performance is not up to par with the latest Intel CPUs(yes, I know a lot of that comes from clock speed bumps), and I'm not convinced all games will use Vulkan. There's just no need for every game to have support for multiple cores that high, and therefore Zen will always suffer from lesser performance in some games IMO. Even if all games are multi-core aware, devs might cut it off to 4 logical cores because they may experience diminishing returns. 

 

Everyone is screaming about AMD optimizing for Ryzen, but we only have dev claims along with AMD's claims that they're going to actually do it, or that they've done it. I want to see actual numbers, not claims with no data. 

[daniellearmouth]

1 minute ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Everyone is screaming about AMD optimizing for Ryzen, but we only have dev claims along with AMD's claims that they're going to actually do it, or that they've done it. I want to see actual numbers, not claims with no data. 

It'll be a little while before we see tangible results where that's concerned. I don't doubt it will happen, but AMD would have to absolutely take it seriously and also optimise for games that are out now and not just upcoming ones.

We will see in due course whether it improves or if we've reached a sort of dead end.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 3/7/2017 at 6:33 AM, Godlygamer23 said:

One issue with having a CPU that's less powerful than another, and one that's less useful at lower resolutions(in this case 1080p) means that it will bottleneck higher end video cards made in the future at resolutions that will effectively become the same as 1080p. 

That kind of extrapolations haven't worked well in the past. The no infamous video reposted to death by now makes many points, not all equally valid, but it does show how re-tests with GPUs with different resolutions didn't validate these extrapolations at all.

 

49 minutes ago, daniellearmouth said:

Uhh, a CPU doesn't suddenly lose IPC for one thing and have it for another. That's not how CPUs work.

And this is why synthetic benchmarks are much more informative than "real world" tests, gaming or otherwise. While what you care about in the end is the experience you will get running the programs you use, a "gaming benchmark" is simultaneously testing the CPU, the GPU, the game itself, and you end up with "in game A the difference is X, in game B the difference is Y", etc, etc. At the end of the day, you either only plan to play the game(s) they tested at the same settings with a similar GPU for the lifetime of your build, or you are left in the dark.
Synthetic tests at least tell you the capabilities of the CPU in different areas, and the differences have technical explanations behind them. Encryption is encryption, FP calculations are FP calculations, It's not like you need to solve 15 math problems with the CPU, and you still don't know if the next math problem will be "optimized for the CPU"  

[Aw_Ginger_Snapz]

I think that AMD has a compelling chip. Just because Ryzen isn't as good as a 7700k at gaming as of now, doesn't mean that Ryzen is bad at gaming. A 10 FPS difference is almost nothing. I think that the only thing that Ryzen needs is time.  Developers need time to better optimize their software to utilize Ryzen to its full potential. We see this time and time again in the GPU market, where a newly released GPU is not going as good as it will a few months down the road. because of drivers. Ryzen has the raw performance, but it is not being utilized to its full potential. Give it a few months, and I guarantee that the gap will be a lot closer than it is now. 

 

A lot of people forget about Intel's original introduction of hyper-threading technology in 2002 on the Pentium 4 HT. Which was very under utilized, and even sometimes hurt performance because it added a bunch of overhead. Since then, we've seen a vast performance improvements to Hyper-threading because the technology has had the benefit of time to mature. This isn't a luxury that Ryzen has right now. The chip has been out for less than a week for god sakes. Also, AMD's SMT technology is not the same as Hyperthreading. They are two different technologies that achieve the same end goal, (to increase the amount of logical threads) through different methods. As of now, the only improvement that Ryzen needs is better optimization. This is proven by people who have SMT disables, which in turn gave them better performance in some applications including games. And when I mean better optimization, I am not talking about releasing the same architecture and platform at a higher clock speed, cost, process node, and with some RGB LEDs stapled on. *Cough Kaby Lake Cough*

 

Also, I noticed a lot of people mentioning that the price of Kaby Lake is less than Ryzen. That is true and false at the same time. The MSRP that Intel decided for the 7700k still remains at $399 USD. The $299 price tag that people are talking about is in the retail space at places like Microcenter and Newegg. This means that Intel still wants people to pay $399 for their CPU, but retailers are smart enough to know that the 7700k is not worth that much in a marketplace where Ryzen has a lower MSRP. If Newegg and Microcenter kept the 7700k at $399, then it wouldn't sell as well as the R7 1700 or even the R71700X. 

 

Ryzen is a completely different animal from what we have seen before. If you are on an old platform and looking for a long term upgrade, get Ryzen. It gives you more threads for the money, is less money at MSRP, and gives a solid gaming performance. Ryzen isn't "bad" at anything. The chip has been out for less than a week, and gives amazing performance. If the 7700k had 8 cores and 16 threads, with as many PCI-e lanes as Ryzen, and just as much cache, and other features as Ryzen, this would be a whole different story.

[79wjd]

@Aw_Ginger_Snapz

The 7700k hasn't been selling anywhere near MSRP basically since it launched. It's been around $330 (after supply shortages ended) -- the same as every i7-k before it.

[done12many2]

On 3/6/2017 at 11:31 PM, He_162 said:

AMD Ryzen processors are polarizing the community, or is it the community that is polar about AMD products?

AMD Ryzen processors are somewhat worse than intel in gaming at 1080p, but despite this, they do their job, and they do it so well, that you really can't tell how much worse they are without the marker on the screen telling you it's worse.

 

That being said, they are over twice as cheap or up to 5x as cheap as the intel i7-6900K, and offer far better price / performance, and that is why they are here, budget. Did you guys expect a budget 8 core to perform almost as well as an i7-6900K?!??!

Secondly, Intel is on the verge of releasing a new series of extreme processors, meaning team blue fans do not need to care about the i7-6900K, or Ryzen's performance, as there is no way Intel is going to make a new series of processors that are worse than Ryzen, they can pay the premium price for a high end processor in the upcoming months, that will most likely be superior to Broadwell-E by at the VERY LEAST 10%, as if it wasn't at least that fast, Intel would be in trouble.

 

So with that in mind, why even bother talking about Ryzen if you aren't going to get it? Let people with a smaller wallet get an 8 core processor, and let them be great content creators, but keep your negativity out of the way of anyone wanting a better performance processor, or the best, instead, tell them to wait for Skylake / Kabylake - X.

Please, no fighting, we all know Ryzen at the current time performs worse in the average games, but better in others, that was  to be expected, and Intel fans jumped on the idea of Ryzen being worse. We do not need to discuss benchmarks, that was not the point of that processors release, the following topics should be discussed in this thread:

Price to performance

Content Creation

Future "extreme" processors / high core count processors

Streaming performance

 

Those topics are the relevant ones. Intel loses in the top one, and we can further discuss what these processors are mainly going to be used for here. Gaming at 1080p on a 500$ or 1100$ processor does not make sense anyway, so I should stress that I will not tolerate game performance discussions here, there are several hundreds of threads across the internet and on this forum for that.

 

I like how you tried to focus this thread into a certain outcome, but immediately strayed off path yourself.  

 

Anyway, this is going to be nothing but another AMD vs Intel thread.  We've beaten that horse to death, revived it and beat it to death a few more times already.

[Aw_Ginger_Snapz]

Just now, djdwosk97 said:

@Aw_Ginger_Snapz

The 7700k hasn't been selling anywhere near MSRP basically since it launched. It's been around $330 (after supply shortages ended) -- the same as every i7-k before it.

It still doesn't change the fact that Intel thinks that the customer should pay $350. Which is still more expensive than the R7 1700 at $329. Like I said before, the low prices you are mentioning are happening in the retail space. You can look up what the suggested customer price is on Intel ARK.