AMD ryzen

Tom DWC

Tom DWC

Moderator
Moderator
The gaming numbers are a tad disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. The 1080p numbers are slightly concerning though, that IPC deficit might not be a problem now but we all know how much faster GPUs get mad gains compared to CPUs. This all assumes single core performance will continue to reign supreme though. Maybe AMD are right this time. And if you're a streamer, you're probably very happy right about now.

Comparing it to an FX CPU and seeing it trounce all over a quad core Intel chip in professional multi-threaded workloads took a moment to process. Did anyone honestly believe they'd ever see an AMD chip trading blows with Intel's enthusiast platform ever again? The mid and low end is probably going to be even more interesting on the gaming front too.

We need to see if the RAM issue will be ironed out (seems likely) and what the deal is with SMT reducing fps in gaming workloads (less likely, Intel had similar issues with hyper threading in its infancy). But overall, given the price, welcome back AMD. Jesus, a competitive CPU market. Is it 2004?
 
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Wozza63

Biblical Poster
The results have certainly put me in a difficult position.

I have a tough decision to make on whether to go for an i7 or 1700X. I have a heavier workload than most gamers but less than video renderers etc. and it will still be used primarily for gaming.

Tom makes a very good point, sooner or later a large number of cores is going to be standard and games will take advantage of them. It's just a matter of when. When AMD released the Bulldozers it looked like multi threaded games were going to be common place but it came too soon (FX 8 cores still hold up to i5s in games that really support that many cores).

Hopefully in the next couple of months AMD can release some patches for the few minor issues as well as some optimisations for single threaded workloads.

Would be nice if they would switch off cores when only a few threads are being used to allow more headroom on the others.
 
Tom DWC

Tom DWC

Moderator
Moderator
Wozza365 said:
The results have certainly put me in a difficult position.

I have a tough decision to make on whether to go for an i7 or 1700X. I have a heavier workload than most gamers but less than video renderers etc. and it will still be used primarily for gaming.

Tom makes a very good point, sooner or later a large number of cores is going to be standard and games will take advantage of them. It's just a matter of when. When AMD released the Bulldozers it looked like multi threaded games were going to be common place but it came too soon (FX 8 cores still hold up to i5s in games that really support that many cores).

Hopefully in the next couple of months AMD can release some patches for the few minor issues as well as some optimisations for single threaded workloads.

Would be nice if they would switch off cores when only a few threads are being used to allow more headroom on the others.
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Yeah it's very difficult when you do a bit of both. I'm in the same boat, though my workload is probably lower. It's just hard to pass up that kind of performance in professional applications.

Indeed, and I'm slightly surprised they went down the same route. But at the same time, as you said, they jumped the gun last time. Though unlike last time, they can justify it as the multi-threaded performance numbers hold up, and in some cases completely batter Intel (AIDA64)!

This time I feel they have a much better chance at seeing greater benefit over the next few years, just as with the RX cards have already with Vulkan. The tech is there now, it's just how long it will take to mature, and how quickly Intel punches back with 10nm.

The issues with RAM and SMT would be enough to make me hold off if I was looking to buy right now, though. See what happens first. This is why people should never pre-order.
 
Tom DWC

Tom DWC

Moderator
Moderator
Wozza365 said:
His gaming benchmarks seem to put it on par with a 7700k. Which goes against the trends of almost every other reviewer. Maybe it was just the selection of games that were well optimized.
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Weren't most of his at 4K? It only really falls behind at 1080p once you remove any chance of a GPU bottleneck and the IPC difference shows up.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I can't quite be bothered with the Linus video but the game benches seem to be mostly at 4k, where performance is, obviously, more limited by the GPU anyway. We see the 1800x beat out the other CPUs at 4k there by an FPS or two.

Then on guru3d (whose numbers I usually find to be a shade more generous to multicore CPUs than I'd expect) at 1080p the 1800x loses out in ROTR http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_processor_review,17.html
Whereas it's 91 or 92 FPS across the board for the 1800x, 7700k, 6700k, and the intel multicore lineup at 1440p. Indeed the only two to score 92 were the 1800x and the 7600k...

Gamers Nexus say, among other things:
At this point, you might be left feeling disillusioned when considering AMD’s tech demos. Keep in mind that most of the charts leaked and created by AMD revolved around Cinebench, which is not a gaming workload. When there were gaming workloads, AMD inflated their numbers by doing a few things:

In the Sniper Elite demo, AMD frequently looked at the skybox when reloading, and often kept more of the skybox in the frustum than on the side-by-side Intel processor. A skybox has no geometry, which is what loads a CPU with draw calls, and so it’ll inflate the framerate by nature of testing with chaotically conducted methodology. As for the Battlefield 1 benchmarks, AMD also conducted using chaotic methods wherein the AMD CPU would zoom / look at different intervals than the Intel CPU, making it effectively impossible to compare the two head-to-head.

And, most importantly, all of these demos were run at 4K resolution. That creates a GPU bottleneck, meaning we are no longer observing true CPU performance. The analog would be to benchmark all GPUs at 720p, then declare they are equal (by way of tester-created CPU bottlenecks). There’s an argument to be made that low-end performance doesn’t matter if you’re stuck on the GPU, but that’s a bad argument: You don’t buy a worse-performing product for more money, especially when GPU upgrades will eventually out those limitations as bottlenecks external to the CPU vanish.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreview...review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks/page-8
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Which is possibly a bit harsher than other reviewers, but then the focus is gaming. The comments about the benches are quite interesting.
 
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Wozza63

Biblical Poster
Tom DWC said:
Yeah it's very difficult when you do a bit of both. I'm in the same boat, though my workload is probably lower. It's just hard to pass up that kind of performance in professional applications.

Indeed, and I'm slightly surprised they went down the same route. But at the same time, as you said, they jumped the gun last time. Though unlike last time, they can justify it as the multi-threaded performance numbers hold up, and in some cases completely batter Intel (AIDA64)!

This time I feel they have a much better chance at seeing greater benefit over the next few years, just as with the RX cards have already with Vulkan. The tech is there now, it's just how long it will take to mature, and how quickly Intel punches back with 10nm.

The issues with RAM and SMT would be enough to make me hold off if I was looking to buy right now, though. See what happens first. This is why people should never pre-order.
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Tom DWC said:
Weren't most of his at 4K? It only really falls behind at 1080p once you remove any chance of a GPU bottleneck and the IPC difference shows up.
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Can't understand how anyone could pre order something so expensive. The pre-orders certainly had me concerned about AMD attempting to make a quick buck and short change some people but benchmarks have been better than to suggest just that.

I'm more or less in the market for a new PC now (or at least CPU, mobo, RAM). It's going to be a tough decision, I want to support AMD as it's the only way we'll ever have any kind of competition.

You are probably right on the 4K benchmarks which certainly reduces strain on the CPU. Which makes it even more difficult for me as I'm right in the middle at 1440p (and 2 1080ps).
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
It seems that thermals are an real consideration on the 1800x.
http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreview...review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks/page-4
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,review-33811-11.html
High end cooling seems recommended for heavy workloads.

GamersNexus observe: Using software which does not make adjustments to the raw junction output by the CPU means, like in the case of early AIDA64 revisions during this testing, that you may see temperatures ~20-30C below what reliable tools report.

Which may help explain: http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-1700x-and-1700-processor-review_191753/13 though Legitreviews do note that they're unsure of their AIDA results.

Not a criticism of Ryzen as such, given that even buying a £100 high end cooler it's damn sight cheaper than the 6900k for similar performance in things like Premiere and Blender but may be worth bearing in mind when making build recommendations.
 
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l3v1ck

New member
Personally I'm looking forward to the Ryzen laptop chip reviews. For years Intel have been the CPU's you want on a laptop, which mean settle for rubbish Intel graphics, or having to fork out for a seperate Nvdia GPU (which can be quite power hungry).
AMD APU's have always seemed like a good idea, but the CPU side let them down. Now a Ryzen APU might be a real option for mid range laptop gaming.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
From what I read the mobile chips will be 2H 2017 (I wouldn't expect the early end of that either..). It also seems R5 won't be appearing until Q2 2017 and R3 until H2 as well.

I've not been paying attention to Zen Apus, but apparently some rumours are suggesting they'll be similar to PS4. However, the furthest back I can trace the actual suggestion that Raven Ridge will equate to PS4 graphics or better is this http://wccftech.com/amd-raven-ridge-apu-vega-zen-hbm-2017/ and Khalid Moammer is basically a one-man AMD hype train. I disregard his articles as I prefer to be pleasantly surprised by AMD, not let down due to unrealistic expectations.
 
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Wozza63

Biblical Poster
Oussebon said:
It seems that thermals are an real consideration on the 1800x.
http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreview...review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks/page-4
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,review-33811-11.html
High end cooling seems recommended for heavy workloads.

GamersNexus observe: Using software which does not make adjustments to the raw junction output by the CPU means, like in the case of early AIDA64 revisions during this testing, that you may see temperatures ~20-30C below what reliable tools report.

Which may help explain: http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-1700x-and-1700-processor-review_191753/13 though Legitreviews do note that they're unsure of their AIDA results.

Not a criticism of Ryzen as such, given that even buying a £100 high end cooler it's damn sight cheaper than the 6900k for similar performance in things like Premiere and Blender but may be worth bearing in mind when making build recommendations.
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AMD seem to subtract room temperature or something from their readings. This is not new with Ryzen. HWMonitor displays my CPU at around 20'c despite actually being very warm.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I'd never quite worked out how measuring thermal performance worked on FX CPUs; though I'd not given it much thought it always seemed a bit more opaque than the Intel chips I'd paid any attention to. While not new with Ryzen, and not a problem as long as it's easy enough to work out what's going on with temps for overclocking, I guess it was worth bearing in mind when looking at things like that legitreviews article which shows temps of 50 degrees or so under torture test load.

Reason for posting - some Ryzen gaming benchmarks showing 2133MHz vs 2933MHz DDR4: https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/amd_ryzen_r7_1800x_wplyw_taktowania_pamieci_na_wydajnosc

Seems quite nice. I thought it was more than Intel CPUs got going from 2133MHz to 3000MHz and was at first tempted to point the finger at being CPU bound at 1080p, but looked up Intel benchmarks and saw similar results even in something like The Witcher 3. FO4 gains more off RAM frequency with Intel but it really hates all AMD CPUs so there's probably only so much faster RAM can make up for that.

http://www.techspot.com/article/1171-ddr4-4000-mhz-performance/page3.html
HWUnboxed Kaby Lake : https://youtu.be/LjFu-onLA68?t=263
HWUnboxed Skylake: https://youtu.be/ESeoexGLVFU?t=423
http://techbuyersguru.com/gaming-ddr4-memory-2133-vs-26663200mhz-8gb-vs-16gb?page=2

So not that exciting, but in games like Watch Dogs 2, ROTR, WH:TW it seems to help get those few extra FPS to get up to 60. So anyone getting a Ryzen PC for production with a bit of gaming on the side will probably want that fast RAM if they can squeeze it into the budget.

Edit: the above might be more relevant than I'd realised, seems AMD are really plugging faster RAM: https://videocardz.com/67408/amd-demos-ryzen-5-1600x-performance presumably in part to the concerns about RAM speed and compatibility with Ryzen launch but it seems even more aimed at gaming performance.
 
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Wozza63

Biblical Poster
Liking the look of the Ryzen 5 series that will be launching soon. That 6 core 12 thread is clocked the same as the 1800X and I bet it can get a little more as it won't get as thermal throttled with less cores. Apart from that, it appears to be identical to the 1800X even in cache size, yet its half the price. $250 would put it on par with the i5 price wise and will most definitely beat it out on productivity. As for gaming, I don't think it will drop much from the 1800X in almost all cases, there may actually be improvements.

The 1800X is on par with the i5 if not better, and on games that aren't going to be as well threaded, the 1600X is not going to take a hit in gaming making it better than i5 in gaming and miles better in everything else. Could be the new go-to chip in my opinion and probably the one I'm going to pick up now, I was going to get a 1700X until I saw the announcement.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I thinking this the other day: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/foru...uake-Champions&p=386513&viewfull=1#post386513

For pure gaming (and things like Photoshop that seem to prefer i5s to lots of cores) the 7600k may well still win out overall tbh. F1 "scales amazingly well on more than four CPU cores/threads." and "is one of the few games that benefits from Hyper Threading" (wonder if it even benefits from SMT already? hopefully someone will bench that, would be interesting to see) ( http://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/f1-2016-pc-performance-analysis/ ) With faster RAM the 1600x was getting about 8fps more. I'm not familiar with F1 2016's in-game bench, but it looked like it was running a bit different on the two PCs - not just out of sync but with differences in the positioning of the car and the numbers on the screen...

The Overwatch testing they did in that vid was completely different on each PC but that's not surprising since they were apparently doing live play rather than a benchmark with all bots as you'd probably need to for a more accurate comparison in something like that. Techspot sometimes do an Overwatch iirc bench so we’ll have to watch for that.

For the broader crop of games the i5 7600k may well still lead, looking at how it matched up against the R7 1800x. Some of the 1800x's leads were quite slight, while in some games it fell behind i3s - not just the very single threaded games like FC Primal (apparently), ARMA III, etc. There also seem to be games that like strong single threaded performance and lots of cores, in which case the R5s missing a couple may reign in its performance a touch too much. There's FO4 obviously where Ryzen is a wash, but I think the R5 might suffer in less extreme examples E.g. Deus Ex MD (ugh): http://pclab.pl/art73169-17.html where the 5960x pips the 6850k, but barely, and the R7 1700x pips the i5 6600k, but barely. Possibly Witcher 3 in that bracket as well. Slice a couple of cores off and I think we'd see enough FPS shaved off to leave it just missing out on the crown.

Where the 1800x didn’t lead over the 7600k in average frames it did sometimes do a good deal better with minimums, but again the loss of the cores may shave off some of Ryzen’s edge there for the R5s. Though in Ashes it pipped the i5 for average FPS but lost out in minimums. http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreview...review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks/page-7

The R5s' out of the box frequencies seem no higher than the R7s'. Even if fewer cores translate to a bit more OC headroom, they're unfortunately going head to head with the i5, which will OC higher above its boost clocks than the 7700k will, so there's no guarantee of the R5 moving in for the kill there either. Although if OCing there may not be much point to the 1600x over the non-x, as in the R7 range doesn't the 1700 OC up to the same level as the 1800x OCs? (a bit like the i7 6800k and i7 6850k but without the slightly unnerving voltage difference).

I'm sure any gap, if there is one, is likely to be a lot smaller than between the i7 and R7s though. It looks like a godsend for streamers not to mention budget video editing. Its productivity performance will surely be even more stunning than the R7 range's was, given that it's going up against the top end of the FX series and the i5s with their 4 cores and no HT.

Edit: From a PCS spec advice point of view, I hope we see some benches with the non-K i5s. Since if the 7600k does win out a bit gaming one can only get that with the very expensive mobos here. If the R5s are available with more affordable mobos that also have a well-rounded feature set (M.2s, USB 3.1) for less extreme prices, and are neck and neck with or beat the locked i5s, they might start owning the £1000 and below spec space rather than the 7600 + H110M-R combo that's doing so at the moment. pclab.pl often oblige for locked i5s in benches. Hardwarecanucks have done i5 6400 and 6500 benches before as well.
 
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Wozza63

Biblical Poster
Mobo matters but currently it seems like they are all sold out just about everywhere! They appear to be harder to get than the CPUs at the moment which is a shame.

As for gaming performance, Zen is brand new and even ignoring the underlying architecture, just the numbers on the box make this completely different to what the industry has been used to for years now. It's truly a multi-threading dream and luckily for us, that's become a hell of a lot easier to do since .NET 4.5, not just in game development.

I think Intel are largely to blame for not giving devs any reason to push further, but that falls back to AMD for not being a decent competitor and so on.
 
S

Spuff

Expert
Wozza365 said:
AMD seem to subtract room temperature or something from their readings. This is not new with Ryzen. HWMonitor displays my CPU at around 20'c despite actually being very warm.
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The motherboard should be able to correct (with a decent BIOS) that and therefore allow software to show correct temps.
With the Crosshair VI 0902 BIOS didn't do this, but making an offest in the BIOS sorted it. The latest BIOSes (choice of 2) have corrected the overshight and temps are shown correctly without having to do anything.
 
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l3v1ck

New member
Saw an interesting theory in this month's Custom PC magazine.
Intel may start using AMD GPU's in mobile CPU's. This was based on them recently switching from licensing Nvidia GPU patents to AMD patents, AMD's trivial market share in the mobile market (meaning they have nothing to lose) and the desire to reduce nVidia's revenue.
That would be very interesting if it happened as a quad core Ryzen APU could be good, but an Intel CPU/AMD GPU would be great.
 
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