Quote Originally Posted by Bollwerk View Post
One of the reviews I read said that they didn't do particularly well with multi-threaded games either. Performance was very hit or miss on various games. Maybe that will change as software developers add support for the Ryzen. If I were in the market for a new CPU, I'd hold off for a few weeks to see if gaming performance gets ironed out.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...pu,4951-6.html
Note the comments on Ashes of the Singularity, which they say scales well with additional cores and frequency. However, the Ryzen didn't do as well as they would have expected.
In that Tom's Hardware review, Ryzen is within 10% of the 7700K (when both are clocked at 3.8GHz) in every game except for AoS, which is pretty acceptable seeing as their prior CPU wasn't so great anymore. However, the CEO of AoS personally responded to that saying:

“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 eight-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

If you look at BF4 right below it, which is known for how awesome it is at utilizing multi-threading, Ryzen is right there next to Kaby Lake. Here are some other statements that TH makes about some of the game performance benchmarks:


  • "The Ryzen 7 1800X provides the same performance as Intel's Core i7-6900K, pushing the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FE into graphics-bound territory."
  • "The gap narrows even more between Ryzen and Intel's processors as we shift to 2560x1440."
  • "The Ryzen 7 1800X averages 91+ FPS during the benchmark, and only lags the Core i7-7700K by 2.8 FPS."
  • "In all four configurations, the Intel processors are separated by a scant 0.2 FPS during the graphics-intensive workload. The Ryzen 7 1800X offers nearly the same performance as the leading CPUs."


Now, I didn't dig into the setup for the Tom's review*, so I don't really know why they forced the 1800X to sit at 3.8GHz when it boosts up to 4.0GHz out of the box, and I don't see any benchmarks from them where they tried to overclock it, even though they mention water cooling in their initial test setup.
* I just skimmed a lot of stuff looking for quick answers, but didn't find any (Hey, I'm busy right now!)

I dunno... I think AMD did a pretty good job after all these years of being way behind.

The Guru3D review shows the same, where Ryzen is within about 10% compared to Intel, and half of the time it's dead even at higher resolutions. Hell, if you do other things on your computer other than gaming, like rendering video, then Ryzen is tied with, or better than, 8/10-core $1000+ Intel CPUs. Granted, Guru3D did have their Ryzen CPU under an AIO water cooler, I believe.

Now, on the other hand, the Intel 7700K is still very sexy, and it's better at single-threaded performance, which plenty of things we do on a daily basis still benefit greatly from. Intel is arguably more popular these days and also has better features on their chipsets, which probably equates to motherboard manufacturers trying fancier things on the Intel motherboards that they offer, but they had better f'ing have those things seeing as Intel's R&D budget has got to be orders of magnitude larger than AMD's, when it comes to the CPU sector.

Personally, when I look at CPUs I estimate their performance based upon how much I think I can overclock them. Realistically, I try for 800-1,000Mhz of additional clockspeed over their base clock, which is usually about a 20-30% gain (and I've been successful with this over the past several years). Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with 4-core mainstream setups, and the 7700K already starts at 4.2GHz and boosts up to 4.5GHz, so I wouldn't think that I could overclock the 7700K all that much.

Guru3D did some overclocking on Ryzen, but they did have it under water which most people don't want to mess with (even factory sealed setups). So, if you're stuck on air and don't do anything except play games, then the Intel 7700K is probably the better choice. However, if you're gaming, streaming, recording, encoding, et cetera... then the $500 1800X doesn't look too shabby when compared to other 8/10-core CPUs like the 5960X, 6900K, or 6950X, all of which are much more expensive*, but I'm also not a fan of jumping on brand new CPUs/chipsets when they release (neither CPU or GPU). :)
* Again, the Intel X99 chipset may be a lot better than AMD's current offering. I haven't directly compared the two, but it still costs a lot more to go with Intel right now.