Vast swathes of enthusiasts appeared to be polarized yesterday in their view of the first round of AMD Ryzen reviews. The Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X and 1700 have been benchmarked at scores of review outlets and even amongst journalists, there was some variation in whether Ryzen is shaping up to be a great CPU or a bit of a flop.
The verdicts
The problem came primarily from game testing, where at popular mid-level resolutions such as 1,920 x 1,080, the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X was slower than Intel CPUs, with some odd results in some games such as Ashes of the Singularity. Here are some of those conclusions:
We know from the RAW and synthetic performance benchmarks that the cores are fast enough, in fact VERY fast. Somehow that does not relate to game performance... This is the only real nag that we stumbled into...Fact is that AMD might have struck gold with Ryzen, yet they’re charging you a silver price. These processors are pure value. Guru3D
The 1800X is a disappointment, and is not a processor we recommend for gamers when considering the price-point. If you were to buy it, disable SMT for gaming. It’s mostly detrimental, likely due to resource contention among threads in gaming environments. But yes: The 1800X is an impressive competitor to the 6900K in production, and it’s significantly cheaper. We’d recommend the 1800X over the 6900K for folks who genuinely use software acceleration. It’s just not good for gaming- GamerNexus
The Core i7-6900K is simply out-done by the Ryzen 7 1800X and in a massive way. It's not just vastly more expensive, it's rarely much faster, and the 1800X also showed impressive IPC and efficiency too.There are some teething problems to get over, and don't expect as polished an experience as you would from an Intel Z270 system right now - hopefully these things will improve as we see new drivers and BIOSes enter the fray. It's for these niggles that we've only given the Ryzen 7 1800X our recommended award - it's just not polished enough yet, at least in our experience for our top award. - bit-tech
The Good: Massive multi-core performance, Aggressive pricing, Smart calls on architecture, Energy efficient design, Gives users honest choice, Significant ecosystem support The Bad: Limited overclocking potential, Single-thread not as good as Intel, Gaming optimisations still needed. - Hexus
There's no identifiable reason why it would be slower, with some tweaks improving, but not solving the slow frame rates and reducing performance in some areas, and all other evidence pointing at the results being an anomaly or down to poor optimization.
There could be trouble ahead
There is the argument that at higher resolutions, which is where someone that's spent $500 on a CPU will be gaming such as 2,560 x 1,440 and 4K, the differences are mostly ironed out, most likely due to the GPU becoming more of the deciding factor.
The problem is, that argument won't hold up with the cheaper AMD CPUs, most notably the Ryzen 5 1500X and 1600X, which will be sitting in gamer's systems at lower resolutions. They won't offer any more performance than the Ryzen 7 1800X as the Ryzen 5 1600X actually has fewer cores, but the same amount of L3 cache, base and turbo frequencies. In fact, the Ryzen 5 1600X is shaping up to be a much better-value CPU than the Ryzen 7-series, for those that won't be needing all the extra multi-threaded performance.
AMD Announces Ryzen 5 1600X and 1500X: Faster Than Expected, These Are The Real Intel-beaters
Multi-threaded performance is superb for the price
There is, of course, another argument going in AMD's favor, which is that for anyone that does often use rendering, video editing or other programs that benefit from the extra cores and threads, Ryzen is shaping up to be fantastic value. For example, most reviews put the Ryzen 7 1800X as having a score in Cinebench of around 1600 points, while the Intel Core i7-6900K scores around 100 points less at around 1500, but costs twice the price. When overclocked, the Ryzen 7 1800X was able to trounce the Intel CPU even when it was overclocked too.
Is Ryzen right for you?
It's swings and roundabouts, as they say, but asking whether Ryzen is better than Intel's Core CPUs is to misunderstand the current situation completely. It will depend on your budget, your situation, and your current needs and there will likely be a specific Ryzen CPU that's best for you.
I do a lot of multi-threaded work and content creation: If you do a lot of multi-threaded work in rendering or content creation, then you can save a lot of money and get better performance by switching to AMD, which is often more power-efficient too.
I game at high resolutions and/or some multi-threaded work: If you game at high resolutions and do a small amount of multi-threaded work, then again, Ryzen is definitely worth considering, although questionably so if you're not building a new system and already have something modern from Intel with a CPU sporting six or more cores. You'll need to buy a new motherboard and possibly memory too, don't forget.
I game at medium resolutions: The indications are that for some reason, Ryzen can struggle at low resolutions in some games, although this only appears to be when frame rates are high and a high-end graphics card is being used. However, there are some cases where even more mid-range graphics cards such as AMD's R9 390X, which is much slower than Nvidia's GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, also showed slow frame rates in some games when paired with the Ryzen 7 1800X. For this reason, we'd suggest either opting for an Intel system using one of its quad-core CPUs, or waiting for AMD's next round of Ryzen releases, hopefully including the Ryzen 5 series.
I'll be back with more Ryzen news and benchmarks. Till then, follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
