AMD released a few days ago its new Ryzen CPUs and as we’ve already reported, they were a bit underwhelming in gaming. And while AMD claimed that its Ryzen CPUs will see benefits via future optimizations, AMD’s CEO Lisa Su claimed that AMD will not be able to win every head-to-head battle with Intel.
As Lisa told Anandtech:
“I think PC gaming is doing quite well, which is one of the hot markets. We are addressing as a gamers as a very important segment, but they are one of many important segments of users for us. We think Ryzen is a great gaming CPU, and you’ll test that for yourself – we’re not going to win every head-to-head, but if you think about gaming do you want theoretical performance or do you want the CPU to be good enough to showcase your GPU? I think what Ryzen allows is those folks to do something more than just gaming. So your gaming CPU might only uses four cores, but if you are doing video editing or streaming it will do a lot more. So I think what we’re trying to address is maybe the forward thinking users, not just the today gamer.”
It’s pretty obvious from these statements that AMD is not focusing on improving the single-threaded performance of its AMD Ryzen CPUs.
What’s also interesting here is that AMD’s CEO did not state anything about future BIOS versions of AMD’s Ryzen CPUs improving performance in existing games. And to be honest, we don’t expect any miracles or huge improvements. Since most games still rely on single-thread performance, we don’t expect AMD’s Ryzen CPUs to compete with Intel’s CPUs in current titles, unless the developers overhaul their engines in order to scale on more than three or four CPU cores.
A couple of days ago, AMD claimed that it’s working with developers in order to further optimize their engines for its Ryzen CPUs. Our guess is that these engines will scale on more than four CPU cores, something that will benefit AMD’s Ryzen CPUs compared to Intel’s high performant quad-cores.
However, it’s worth noting that such a thing will also – and perhaps significantly – improve overall performance on Intel’s 6-core and 8-core CPUs.
So yeah, it will be interesting to see how current games will perform on Intel’s CPUs once – and if – they receive their “Ryzen” patches, and how new game engines will scale on 6-core and 8-core CPUs!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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