remember when not quite 100% compatibility in buying amd chipsets/cpus/mobos meant:
–having to install system-level low-level chipset/cpu drivers, dual-cpu optimizer utils
–an amd cpu may not have had mmx/sse/sse2 support
man i hope we don’t run into that this time around.
[quote=“rei, post:41, topic:128606, full:true”]–an amd cpu may not have had mmx/sse/sse2 support
[/quote]
Heck, you have that already just with Intel parts. AVX512 alone has all sorts of optional pieces that not all SKUs support, never mind various other optional parts of the ISA. Any modern code relying on CPU generation to determine which ISA is available is not going to work well for anything beyond a least common denominator approach. These days, you have to check for each of the various optional hardware extensions independently.
yeah that’s intel differentiating their product by doing stuff like removing virtualization support on the unlocked k chips.
This is with the i7-6800k and (oddly) Ryzen clocked at exactly the same speed for perfect apples to apples:
Very nice if they can keep up with single threaded Intel Skylake and offer 50% more cores for less… substantial win.
R7 1800X : @ 4.1GHz ( with XFR )
i7 7700K : @ 4.5GHz
i7 6900K : @ 4.0GHz ( with Turbo Core 3.0 )
i7 6800K : @ 3.8GHz ( with Turbo Core 3.0 )
i7 5960X : @ 3.5GHz
FX 8350 : @ 4.2GHz
Essentially what this does is forces Intel to either charge less or put more cores on the same die.
The thing is that the iGPU on the Core chips would make that problematic.
But you know who the big driver for Intel to improve their iGPU performance was/is? Apple.
Either they start creating a line of Core CPUs without the integrated GPU to accommodate more CPU cores, or the chip size increases, which means fewer CPUs per die, and probably increased cooling demands for larger chips.
Ohh right I keep forgetting about the iGPU. I wonder how many 6700k and 7700k buyers actually use the iGPU?
Laptop owners quite a few. Desktop owners not many at all. For desktop owners it might be higher if they’re able to stream games with the igpu while the video card does the main work like normal.
For someone with a dedicated GPU is there any use for the iGPU? I’ve read that DX12 allows for it, but only Ashes of the Singularity appears to actually be ready for it, and I very much question the wisdom of pairing a decent dedicated GPU with an iGPU, at least for gaming purposes…
Really? Laptops come with the 95w 6700k or 7700k, not the mobile variants? Doubtful.
Some do, but only gigantic desktop replacement laptops with <1 hour of battery life, and those all have desktop-class GPUs too.
I think in theory DX12 could provide uses for it, like you say, but I think it’ll be years still before we start seeing adoption of it in any significant way (if even then). I mean, there’s a lot of games just finally getting moved over to DX11 and that came out in 2009!
If I’m remembering correctly, to make use of multiple GPUs that differ that much in capability in DX12 is the more difficult path for an engine developer. If you have two roughly equivalent GPUs you can kind of just split the work, but if you were to try to do that with a dedicated card and the integrated, it’d massively slow things down. So you need to write custom code in your engine to realize it’s just a small integrated GPU and then hand off specific tasks to it. Maybe rendering the UI or something like that, so the real graphics card can focus on the good stuff.
Ars review is … mixed.
A little more of an enthusiastic review: https://semiaccurate.com/2017/03/02/amds-ryzen-7-1800x-ryzen-review/
Mixed is still a huge improvement over what was before.
Yes, the iGPU can be paired with a dedicated GPU in DirectX12 games, but it remains to be seen whether the performance gain is worthwhile. I kinda doubt it.
However the iGPU is used for other stuff. On mobile, you can disable the dedicated GPU and save a ton of battery juice when you’re out and about. It’s also useful for encoding h.264 video in hardware via intel quicksync.
Back to Ryzen, it is basically single-core competitive with Haswell/Broadwell i7s but not quite up to Skylake/Kaby, at the same clocks. On multi-core benchmarks it obviously obliterates everything with less than 8 cores. It doesn’t overclock very well, so keep that in mind when looking at all the reviews. It won’t get much over 4.0Ghz, while intel “K” CPUs overclock like demons.
If you’re building a straight-up gaming battlestation, you still want an i7-7700k. Better IPC and it has a huge clock advantage if you overclock it to 4.8Ghz+. Otherwise, if you do stuff that benefits from more cores like content creation or code compiling, the R7-1700X is a very attractive choice-- reasonably close performance per-core to a modern intel i7, and you get twice as many of them.
Wow release day and no discussion? Must be weak results!
Seems like this sums it up… “fine but not exceptional performer”
Give one enough threads, as a couple of our benchmark titles do, and a Ryzen CPU can be a fine, if not exceptional performer. Most games still don’t take advantage of n threads, however, and in situations like GTA V, lower-end Ryzens can’t keep our GTX 1080 fed any better than 2012’s Core i7-3770K.
I’ve been saying this for a long time. Still, good that AMD is mostly competitive on single threaded stuff!
At 4 GHz or so, the Zen architecture lands somewhere between Broadwell and Haswell in single-threaded throughput.
It’s funny because they missed exactly the target audience. Making Ryzen better at games would’ve been the ideal audience for AMD right now, and it turns out it’s still better to go Intel for price per dollar. I think this is going to be a surprisingly big whiff for the early adopter set.
I expect the Ryzen 5 series will be a better deal for gamers, at least in terms of value.
In practical benchmarks at settings and resolutions people play at the difference is pretty small. And at 60hz. For people trying to run at 144 Hz the difference may enough to be considered? On other stuff:
That’s correct. But for your money, the 7700k is still a better choice for playing videogames. Ryzen is a dramatically better deal for anything that noticeably benefits from >4 cores.
Remember Ryzen is the very first generation of an entirely new architecture, while Intel is on their 7th generation. It’s plausible that AMD can improve their hardware over the coming generations more than intel, because those low-hanging fruit optimizations haven’t been plucked yet. Same deal with software optimizations-- in the OS, in software, and in drivers.
