Friday, March 3rd 2017

AMD Responds to Ryzen's Lower Than Expected 1080p Performance

The folks at PC Perspective have shared a statement from AMD in response to their question as to why AMD's Ryzen processors show lower than expected performance at 1080p resolution (despite posting good high-resolution, high-detail frame rates). Essentially, AMD is reinforcing the need for developers to optimize their games' performance to AMD's CPUs (claiming that these have only been properly tuned to Intel's architecture). AMD also puts weight behind the fact they have sent about 300 developer kits already, so that content creators can get accustomed to AMD's Ryzen, and expect this number to increase to about a thousand developers in the 2017 time-frame. AMD is expecting gaming performance to only increase from its launch-day level. Read AMD's statement after the break.
AMD's John Taylor had this to say:

"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."

Two game developers also chimed in.

Oxide Games, creators of the Nitrous game engine that powers Ashes of the Singularity:

"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

And Creative Assembly, the creators of the Total War Series and, more recently, Halo Wars 2:

"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. "
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