AMD Confident Ryzen Gaming Performance Will Get Better

By Nathan Kirsch

On Thursday, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) launched Ryzen, its brand new high-performance desktop PC processor and over the past 24 hours it appears that the processor hasn’t lived up to its hype. The new AMD Ryzen 7 processors exceeded our expectations for content creation and workstation applications, but did fall a little short when it came to 1080P video game performance in our review. The underwhelming 1080P gaming performance has many folks spooked and we totally get that because it was a shock when we saw the numbers as well. How could Ryzen crush the multi-threaded applications, put up decent numbers in the single-threaded application tests, and then fall short on just game titles that weren’t GPU bound?

John Taylor AMD
John Taylor Speaking At The Ryzen Tech Day in February 2017

The good news is that AMD believes that the video game tests came up short because most all of them are games that have been optimized for Intel processors. AMD did believes that Ryzen CPU performance can be improved with a combination of driver and game engine optimizations, but those will take time for video game developers to figure out and they will likely need to introduce game patches when they are ready. AMD also expects motherboard BIOS (UEFI) updates and possibly some Windows driver updates to help things out as well. The take home message here is that the Ryzen 7 benchmark numbers today are the starting point and that they strongly believe that those numbers will get better as time goes on.

Legit Reviews spoke with John Taylor, AMD’s vice president of worldwide marketing,and he believes that video game developers will be able to improve performance once they utilize the capabilities of Ryzen processors.

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

My. Taylor also noted that AMD Ryzen 7 series processors win or tie at 1080P resolutions in these game titles (specific scenes are mentioned to be specific and in case someone wants to re-produce):

  • Sniper Elite 4: Ultra (DX12)
  • Sniper Elite 4: Ultra (DX11)
  • Battlefield One: Ultra (DX12)
  • Division: Ultra (DX12)
  • Call of Duty Infinite Warfare: High (DX11)
  • Dishonored2: Ultra (DX11)
  • Watch Dogs 2 Ultra (DX11)
  • Deus Ex Mankind Divided: Ultra (DX12)
  • Deus Ex Mankind Divided: Ultra (DX11)
  • Battlefield Hardline
  • Overwatch: Epic (Russia)
  • Battlefield 4 (Airfield)
  • Witcher 3: Ultra Hair Works On
  • Witcher 3: Ultra Hair Works Off
  • Witcher 3: Ultra Hair Works On (Horse)
  • Witcher 3: Ultra Hair Works Off (Horse)
  • Sniper Elite 3: Ultra
  • Dragon Age Inquisition: Ultra
  • Crysis 3 (Canyon)
  • Tomb Raider
  • Tomb Raider: Ultra
  • Rocket League