AMD Ryzen: back in the game?

The results HardOCP mentioned that lower resolution gaming (1080p) struggled versus higher resolution gaming is just weird. Is that architecture, bugs or drivers? Or all of the above.

Lower resolutions tend to be CPU-bound. Higher resolutions tend to be GPU-bound. This is, almost certainly, why the preliminary benchmarks AMD released were at 4K, because at that level, the video card is the bottleneck.

For a given game engine, typically the best possible test of a CPU is to run at the lowest resolution possible. That moves the most load away from the video card.

My overall take: if you're buying a system to do actual work with, and your work benefits from wide multithreading, Ryzen is very appealing. If you're a gamer, you're probably still better off with Intel. We should watch carefully, though, because both companies will keep advancing, and it's actually somewhat competitive right now. For the last decade or so, AMD has been much better about iterating and fixing problems in their silicon; they made major advances with both Phenom and Bulldozer. (Of course, Bulldozer started out so terrible that it didn't help them much, but they still improved it a bunch.)

edit: also, if you're working with virtual machines, AMD's Pacifica has some advantages over Intel's VT. I don't remember all of them, but one is that you can virtualize 16-bit instructions at full hardware speed, rather than running them through software emulation, so you should be able to run old DOS applications smoking fast in a Pacifica VM.

On an eight-core, 64-gig machine, I can see some real uses for virtualization.

I haven't had a chance to dig into the reviews yet but what about price points for gaming? For example at a $300 cap are you better off with Intel or AMD?

Oh, I just realized that you have to run Win10 with Ryzen.

They're not selling me jack sh*t.

Feb 9:

Malor wrote:

Then I won't officially buy the chip. Win7 is still in service. Support it, or don't sell me anything.

March 3:

Malor wrote:

Oh, I just realized that you have to run Win10 with Ryzen.

They're not selling me jack sh*t.

The LoLz are strong with this one.

Hey now, marketing hype makes us forget things.

GoldenDog wrote:

Feb 9:

Malor wrote:

Then I won't officially buy the chip. Win7 is still in service. Support it, or don't sell me anything.

March 3:

Malor wrote:

Oh, I just realized that you have to run Win10 with Ryzen.

They're not selling me jack sh*t.

The LoLz are strong with this one.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-w...

There will be the ability to run it.. its just not officially supported.. though hardly an AMD only thing as Intel and Microsoft with the new Kaby Lake CPU's are doing the exact same thing. Technology and Time rarely are happy bed-fellows.

Technology and Time rarely are happy bed-fellows.

Microsoft has to have leaned on AMD to shut out Win7. That's just dumb.

The only way I could use it is with Linux. Phoronix has some Linux benchmarks here on the 1700.

The way I'd summarize it: it's a good solid chip for multithreaded workloads, but it's pretty bad for gaming. The 7700K wrecks it at pretty much every game they tried, and the beating is especially severe in Vulkan. (which seems odd.)

You're probably not doing that much gaming on a Linux box, but it's a lot more reasonable than it used to be. The 7700K is pretty comparable most of the time, is a LOT better at games, and costs $20 more.

For a few things, though, like kernel compiles, Ryzen is very, very good. If you were buying a build box, that 1700 looks pretty sweet. The lack of integrated video is a problem, though. It's weird that Ryzen doesn't have anything at all, when CPU/GPU integration has been the central strategy from AMD for so long. Lousy video would be fine, you don't need much for a compute server, but no video at all means you'd have to buy an additional card to use the machine.

Some games have now been shown gaining 20+ fps with SMT disabled on Ryzen processors.

Suggests some kind of thread scheduling issue related to SMT, which is just AMD's equivalent of Hyperthreading.

Also suggests something that is very patchable, either in the games themselves or in Windows, whichever it is that needs it. Of course it doesn't bear out to that degree for all games, but some games harder on the CPU like Dirt get big gains.

I'd expect AMD to put in a lot of work ironing out a majority of the supposed gaming deficiencies.

As for the 7700k wrecking it, it only does so at 1080p or below with a very high end video card. If you have a 1070 or 1080 and you're that worried about playing at 135fps instead of 110 at 1080p... you're in a pretty specific minority of people.

I've not seen anyone do comparisons with lesser videocards, but I bet the moment you drop down to a 1060 or RX480 and you have a much tighter GPU bottleneck, like the vast majority of people playing PC games, then the differences are suddenly very minor.

An R7 1700 at $330 OC'd to 3.9ghz or so is a kind of amazing budget encoding/streaming/editing/etc workstation that will game right alongside a lot of i5 stuff, and come very close to i7-6900k performance when doing all that other work. It's a kind of incredible value.

The 1800X is, comparatively, weak on the value side of things at that $500 price given how easy the 1700 and 1700X are to overclock to similar performance.

The ever more common desire to stream and play and edit videos and all of that makes these things just that much more appealing IMO.

As for built in video, APU's are in the release schedule.

Some games have now been shown gaining 20+ fps with SMT disabled on Ryzen processors.

With eight real cores, you don't even need it. And, like I was talking about somewhere here, hyperthreading totally fouls up the OS' own scheduling, so that it becomes quite difficult to run background tasks without affecting foreground ones very badly. (it can kinda be done in Windows by messing with individual process affinities, but that's a terrible solution.)

Instead, you just disable hyperthreading, and wham, priorities mean something again. It's a much better solution, IMO.

An R7 1700 at $330 OC'd to 3.9ghz

Most won't go that far. AMD doesn't have a lot of process slack, and excellent ability to detect the correct bin for a processor, so chips that can go that fast are going to be 1700Xs instead.

Also, OCing on Ryzen isn't very good, because it totally disables the heat management on the CPU. It's not like the Intel chips, where you crank up the max turbo, and it runs only as fast as it needs to. Rather, it just locks the chip at that speed, and pretty much disables all but emergency thermal management. (ie, it still keeps the chip from being damaged, but that's all.) The intelligent part of the overclocking engine is pretty much pithed, and your heat output and power consumption are likely to go up quite a bit.

Your observations about the CPU not being the bottleneck are true, but they'll be less true going forward. As video cards advance, CPU will become more of an issue, and CPUs these days can last a really long time.

Also, if you look at the actual benchmarks in the Phoronix article, the differences are quite large in many cases. It's quite a dramatic difference. If you're playing a game in Linux where the CPU matters, you're likely to get a lot better result from an Intel chip, at least at present.

Malor wrote:
Technology and Time rarely are happy bed-fellows.

Microsoft has to have leaned on AMD to shut out Win7. That's just dumb.

The only way I could use it is with Linux. Phoronix has some Linux benchmarks here on the 1700.

The way I'd summarize it: it's a good solid chip for multithreaded workloads, but it's pretty bad for gaming. The 7700K wrecks it at pretty much every game they tried, and the beating is especially severe in Vulkan. (which seems odd.)

You're probably not doing that much gaming on a Linux box, but it's a lot more reasonable than it used to be. The 7700K is pretty comparable most of the time, is a LOT better at games, and costs $20 more.

For a few things, though, like kernel compiles, Ryzen is very, very good. If you were buying a build box, that 1700 looks pretty sweet. The lack of integrated video is a problem, though. It's weird that Ryzen doesn't have anything at all, when CPU/GPU integration has been the central strategy from AMD for so long. Lousy video would be fine, you don't need much for a compute server, but no video at all means you'd have to buy an additional card to use the machine.

Again Intel and MS did the same thing with Kaby Lake.. so no official support under Windows 7 for the latest Intel either.

Your observations about the CPU not being the bottleneck are true, but they'll be less true going forward. As video cards advance, CPU will become more of an issue, and CPUs these days can last a really long time.

Sure..but that supposes 1080P continues to be the dominate resolution. Like it or not we are moving to a world where 4K becomes the standard resolution.

Again Intel and MS did the same thing with Kaby Lake.. so no official support under Windows 7 for the latest Intel either.

Which, again, had no technical merit whatsoever. That is purely a political decision.

Sure..but that supposes 1080P continues to be the dominate resolution.

In other words: when CPU doesn't matter, AMD is okay. But that's a lousy damn reason to buy a CPU.

We're still at the point, mostly, of "For games, when CPU matters, Intel is faster." That's much less true than it has been, however. Before, Intel was a lot faster, now it's only moderately ahead. And AMD is pretty good on price/performance and total throughput for apps that can really use multiple cores.

For the first time in years, if you want to support the underdog, it won't cripple your machine.

Malor wrote:
Again Intel and MS did the same thing with Kaby Lake.. so no official support under Windows 7 for the latest Intel either.

Which, again, had no technical merit whatsoever. That is purely a political decision.

No. That's a business decision. There's no business justification to keep testing sh*t on a 7 year old OS when mainstream support ended over two years ago.

Edwin wrote:
Malor wrote:
Again Intel and MS did the same thing with Kaby Lake.. so no official support under Windows 7 for the latest Intel either.

Which, again, had no technical merit whatsoever. That is purely a political decision.

No. That's a business decision. There's no business justification to keep testing sh*t on a 7 year old OS when mainstream support ended over two years ago.

Which runs half the computers in the world.

edit: well, home computers, anyway. I have no idea what the server market looks for either 7 or 10.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Continuing support for a product that hasn't been sold in years because people don't want to pay, pirate or have something against upgrading to the new stuff won't generate revenue and pay my salary. There are not enough resources to go around to justify supporting the old stuff and continue new product development.

Server market is definetly not that big.

Malor wrote:

Your observations about the CPU not being the bottleneck are true, but they'll be less true going forward. As video cards advance, CPU will become more of an issue, and CPUs these days can last a really long time.

Also, if you look at the actual benchmarks in the Phoronix article, the differences are quite large in many cases. It's quite a dramatic difference. If you're playing a game in Linux where the CPU matters, you're likely to get a lot better result from an Intel chip, at least at present.

I don't see how Linux gaming benchmarks are relevant at all. That CSGO benchmark with that videocard should be running at ~350fps on that 7700k system, not 200. When you've cut performance on all the benchmarks listed nearly in half by running them on Linux to start with, sure the differences get more stark and seem more dire.

I'm not seeing anything like what's shown in that article in windows benchmarks, and there's some pretty wild variance in benchmarks run by different sites using the same tests and graphical settings, which implies pretty heavily there's something else going on.

Oh, and on top... Phoronix got maybe the very best top end AM4 board, but then put 2133mhz RAM in it. I've seen benchmarks showing Ryzen scales heavily with RAM speed, like 15fps average going from 2400mhz to 3200. That, on top of it being Linux numbers to begin with paints a pretty bad picture, but I don't know who exactly that picture is painted for.

For the record, I'm not saying run out and buy Ryzen. I ended up not myself, though I still may. I just haven't figured out if I would want it to take over as my main PC or if I'd swap it for my current i7-4790k system that handles all my odds and ends stuff, video encoding, plex server, etc. The 4790k has been a fine processor for that system but it's never been the right one. It's just what I had leftover after going for a Skylake build. A lower power 8core/16thread system makes a lot more sense there.

I'm just saying I think they have a platform now with some kind of incredible potential. It has some kinks that need ironing out and some optimization and patching that needs to happen, whether it's on the part of game devs or Microsoft or BIOS updates from motherboard vendors, but I think once that stuff starts to happen it should improve noticeably.

And I also see no reason to recommend people not buy it at this point, unless their goal is bleeding edge gaming framerates. If you've just gotta have that 130fps instead of 110, or 95 instead of 85... ok buy Intel.

Otherwise I think there's some compelling arguments to be made for AM4 and Ryzen.

Malor wrote:
Edwin wrote:
Malor wrote:
Again Intel and MS did the same thing with Kaby Lake.. so no official support under Windows 7 for the latest Intel either.

Which, again, had no technical merit whatsoever. That is purely a political decision.

No. That's a business decision. There's no business justification to keep testing sh*t on a 7 year old OS when mainstream support ended over two years ago.

Which runs half the computers in the world.

edit: well, home computers, anyway. I have no idea what the server market looks for either 7 or 10.

Key word is runs. Most people buying Ryzen are in theory refreshing significantly if not buying all brand new. No point then installing Windows 7 on there then is there? Outside of the tinfoil hat concerns.

This is an interesting article about what frame rates the human eye can detect and appreciate.

Chances are, if you're buying mid-upper tier technology, unless you have extremely good eyes (which I don't claim to possess - heck, I wear glasses for my shortsightedness) - then you are probably hard pressed to see the difference when your machine is rendering beyond 60FPS-200FPS, let alone I am not convinced there are hordes of gamers buying a monster monitor to render at that refresh rate.

Which is why, when I think about it logically - I game at 1080P and my ancient Samsung panel renders at 60HZ. There is no real need for someone like me to build a hyper machine with something like i7-7700K and 1080Ti components...not like I'd be bottlenecked by Ryzen's mid-range chips anyway.

I don't see how Linux gaming benchmarks are relevant at all.

When I'm specifically talking about Linux gaming, they're pretty f*cking relevant.

Yes, Linux gaming is a thing. No, you don't get to sneer at it. It doesn't have the breadth and variety that Windows does, but it's a perfectly valid scenario, and one that real people actually use in the real world.

And had they been testing with an NVidia card, framerates would probably be much better. On the NVidia side of the fence, Linux is often slightly faster than Windows, not slower. It can be a very nice gaming environment.

edit to add, later:

Continuing support for a product that hasn't been sold in years

They are not providing drivers for an OS that runs half the computers in the world. And Windows 8 and 8.1 are still in mainstream support.

That is insane behavior. It's ludicrous.

IDGAF if it runs 100% of the computers in the world, it's discontinued and dead. If you don't like it, move on to another OS but you're bat sh*t view of the world doesn't pay for my salary. If you want continued support for Win 7, start a patreon and feel free to pay for the additional support.

What % of the gaming market is Linux? And why should publically traded companies trying to make a profit to pay their employees salaries care? Look if XYZ has great Linux support then yay! But I don't want anyone to think it should be any sort of priority for anyone in gaming.

Windows 7 is done..even DX11 is on its last legs.. time waits for no man (or technology) and expecting technology companies to continue to support legacy technology makes no sense. Nobody is buying a new Ryzen build and sticking an outdated OS on it...and even if they are it will run just don't expect official support.

If you don't like it, move on to another OS but you're bat sh*t view of the world doesn't pay for my salary.

Half the computer users in the world can go drop dead because they're not putting dollars into Edwin's pocket.

Gosh, that's so very noble of you.

(hint: maybe if you were doing something valuable to them, they would.)

Move on.

Rumors are flying that Apple is switching to Ryzen for at least the Macbook's if not the entire line. Granted nobody buys laptops or desktops anymore but it's still a great move for AMD.

Quote is not edit.

The decision to not support 'old' Windows versions seems to have originated from Microsoft.

Link

Or at least they're taking the lead, not AMD.

Leaked reviews of the 1400 are making it look like the CPU to get vs the 7700K

AMD Confirms Linux Performance Marginality Problem Affecting Some, Doesn't Affect Epyc / TR

tl;dr: heavy parallel compiles can result in segfaults. Looks like it's a hardware bug, and probably not easy to fix. While AMD is saying 'gosh, we'll have to test better under Linux', that's not especially helpful to the people being bitten here.

Modern CPUs have billions of transistors, so bugs are inevitable, but this particular one .... that's one of the most basic things you'd want to do on Linux with a wide multicore processor. This absolutely should have been caught in early testing.

Malor wrote:

AMD Confirms Linux Performance Marginality Problem Affecting Some, Doesn't Affect Epyc / TR

tl;dr: heavy parallel compiles can result in segfaults. Looks like it's a hardware bug, and probably not easy to fix. While AMD is saying 'gosh, we'll have to test better under Linux', that's not especially helpful to the people being bitten here.

Modern CPUs have billions of transistors, so bugs are inevitable, but this particular one .... that's one of the most basic things you'd want to do on Linux with a wide multicore processor. This absolutely should have been caught in early testing.

Reading the article it seems like it won't occur under any typical user scenario.

That's what AMD says. They're not exactly disinterested.

Running heavy parallel compiles is one of the major uses of a multicore chip under Linux. A huge fraction of that userbase works in software development, or at least are hobbyists.

Of all the massive-computation jobs that Linux typically does, running compilers would absolutely have to be the most common. Video encoding is probably a (far) distant second.

I'd read that claim by AMD a little differently: Ryzen is perfectly reliable under Linux as long as you don't want to actually use your computer to do heavy lifting.