*** AMD "Zen" thread (inc AM4/APU discussion) ***

[opethdisciple]

Is it worth upgrading from my i7 4790k for gaming? I'm looking at the Ryzen 5 Six Core 1600X 4.00GHz with an X370 mobo.

Probably not no. Skip this generation of Ryzen and look at the refresh next year.

I'd say anyone on a i5 can look at the Ryzen's as an upgrade.

Unless you go for a 1700 but even so... honestly an i7 is plenty at the moment.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Is it worth upgrading from my i7 4790k for gaming? I'm looking at the Ryzen 5 Six Core 1600X 4.00GHz with an X370 mobo.

Nah, if you have a high-end Haswell chip, neither AMD nor Intel have anything that's a significant upgrade.

The next iterations is what you need to look at; Ryzen 2 and Coffee-Lake.

 

[Trusty]

Is it worth upgrading from my i7 4790k for gaming? I'm looking at the Ryzen 5 Six Core 1600X 4.00GHz with an X370 mobo.

More ram and a newer GPU might help more than a cpu upgrade.

 

[Vish Petrol]

Is it worth upgrading from my i7 4790k for gaming? I'm looking at the Ryzen 5 Six Core 1600X 4.00GHz with an X370 mobo.

For productivity yes, for gaming no, unless youre potentially looking for better minimums, and want to jump on the platform now.

 

[deuse]

I don't is it's posted yet but MS has started blocking windows 7 and Ryzen.
Windows 7 update want's to install KB4015549 plus some other updates. I've hidden them so MS won't block Ryzen

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/patch_tuesday_mess/

 

[=XDC=FluphyBunny]

So looking at current prices the 1500x looks like a poor choice given the cost of the 1600?

 

[Howie87]

I bought the 1700 and I'm happy with it. £300 for 16 threads is an absolute bargain and I've got it running at 3.8GHz on all cores at 1.325 Vcore.

Not really a huge upgrade from my 2500K @4.2GHz in gaming but it annihilates it everywhere else. Slightly better single threaded performance but 400% moar cores! Just hoping I can push the ram to 3200MHz with bios updates.

 

[DragonQ]

So looking at current prices the 1500x looks like a poor choice given the cost of the 1600?

Most of the X-chips are a waste of time really, assuming you're comfortable overclocking.

 

[eddyr]

Ugh, when will the youtube reviews end! Why are there still a lack of mITX boards!

Main thing holding me back from moving to Ryzen (that and the price of fast DDR4).

On the plus side, at least all the quirks should be resolved by the time they do appear.

 

[KompuKare]

Nah, it's just DX11 hardware for a DX11 era. There are a sprinkling of DX12 games out there but I wouldn't say we are in the DX12 age yet.

I fully expect the next Nvidia series to be from the ground up fully DX12 cards with vastly imporved if not rewritten DX12 drivers.

We already know they are working on it as the clue was the mini 'DX 12 performance drivers' they release last month.

---

Me personally I want to pair my Ryzen with a card now. And it seems Vega will be that card. Better DX12 and Vulkan performance as well as complimentary to Ryzen CPU's.

The 1070... at £400 is shockingly expensive. The card should have launched at little over £300.

Well, these big microchip designs take ages from drawing board to implementation. I guess DX12 is 3 years (March 2014) old now which is just about enough time.

However, if Nvidia weren't so keen on doing things their own way, they would have done the work as soon as the PS4 and the ACEs were announced (Feb2013) or even when Tahiti came out (Jan 2012).

But anyway, either way changing their hardware to fully support DX12 especially for asynchronous compute might not be that easy as they cannot afford to penalise any of the current compute performance. Also, their gaming cards tend to do well on power usage and die size precisely because the took the compute functions out as there is no such thing as free lunch. AMD's perf/watt has probably not just suffered from having no tile rendering or a poorer boost implementation, it has also suffered from having hardware scheduling etc. But some of that they have been able to make up with due to modern games using these features. That is GK104 vs Tahiti and Hawaii vs GK110 no longer looks like it did when they came out:

(from https://www.computerbase.de/thema/grafikkarte/rangliste/)

 

[harney]

I don't is it's posted yet but MS has started blocking windows 7 and Ryzen.
Windows 7 update want's to install KB4015549 plus some other updates. I've hidden them so MS won't block Ryzen

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/patch_tuesday_mess/

 

[Chrisc]

I bought the 1700 and I'm happy with it. £300 for 16 threads is an absolute bargain and I've got it running at 3.8GHz on all cores at 1.325 Vcore.

Not really a huge upgrade from my 2500K @4.2GHz in gaming but it annihilates it everywhere else. Slightly better single threaded performance but 400% moar cores! Just hoping I can push the ram to 3200MHz with bios updates.

What board do you have?

 

[KompuKare]

Anyone think the the price of DDR4 RAM will come down?

Doubt it. There are less and less players all the time.
DRAM is a strange market. There are constantly periods of time (sometimes years) where everyone or almost everyone losses money, followed by some players going bankrupt. Then prices rise and that is I guess where the losses are mitigated. So it's hard so say whether the DRAM manufacturers actually 'rip' us consumers off. I'm sure they love these times where they actually make a profit but there is no way over a span of time they make anything close the profits margins of the likes of Intel, Qualcomm or Nvidia. Okay, DRAM and flash is simpler stuff (far less design, far more manufacturing process) but it's hardly simple stuff either as no new players are willing to drop a few $billion on a factory and risk it.

 

[opethdisciple]

Well, these big microchip designs take ages from drawing board to implementation. I guess DX12 is 3 years (March 2014) old now which is just about enough time.

However, if Nvidia weren't so keen on doing things their own way, they would have done the work as soon as the PS4 and the ACEs were announced (Feb2013) or even when Tahiti came out (Jan 2012).

But anyway, either way changing their hardware to fully support DX12 especially for asynchronous compute might not be that easy as they cannot afford to penalise any of the current compute performance. Also, their gaming cards tend to do well on power usage and die size precisely because the took the compute functions out as there is no such thing as free lunch. AMD's perf/watt has probably not just suffered from having no tile rendering or a poorer boost implementation, it has also suffered from having hardware scheduling etc. But some of that they have been able to make up with due to modern games using these features. That is GK104 vs Tahiti and Hawaii vs GK110 no longer looks like it did when they came out:

(from https://www.computerbase.de/thema/grafikkarte/rangliste/)

Not disputing any of that, as it sounds like you know more on the issue than I do. One thing I will point out tho which is the 390 vs 970 relative performance. I just started playing Assassins Creed Syndicate last night and thought I'd just look at some benchmarks... I noticed the 390 had very poor performance compared to the 970 in this title. Maybe it was just a one off.

I was actually looking at the 390 from the perspective of being a future Vega owner so I am not looking at this with any sort of bias.

I am looking to switch to AMD precisely because I am not happy with Nvidia's DX12 and even Vulkan support.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Not disputing any of that, as it sounds like you know more on the issue than I do. One thing I will point out tho which is the 390 vs 970 relative performance. I just started playing Assassins Creed Syndicate last night and thought I'd just look at some benchmarks... I noticed the 390 had very poor performance compared to the 970 in this title. Maybe it was just a one off.

I was actually looking at the 390 from the perspective of being a future Vega owner so I am not looking at this with any sort of bias.

I am looking to switch to AMD precisely because I am not happy with Nvidia's DX12 and even Vulkan support.

That game is riddled with Gameworks features that badly handicapped AMD Hawaii and prior cards.
Polaris has a specific hardware Primitive Discard accelerator and improved tessellation processing to counter Gameworks.

If you look at Fallout 4 which is also riddled with Gameworks, the RX 480 matches the R9 Fury X, which is a much faster card. In fact both do horribly because of Gameworks in there, where even the Fury X is beaten by the 970.

Now with less and less companies using Gameworks, and more use of DX12 and Vulkan we can clearly see AMD is doing significantly better. Even more so if the AMD GPU is paired with Ryzen.
An extreme Example is Rise of the Tomb Raider, where 2x RX 480s, or the 2950X2 beat the current Titan X when paired with Ryzen.

AMD r9 Fury in DX12 Civ 6 beating GTX 1080

 

[opethdisciple]

Less and less companies using Gameworks. Unfortunately Nvidia still has their claws deep. Unisoft for example. Wild lands, Watchdogs 2. Then For honour etc etc.... Hope Vega won't be gimped to bad by Gameworks.

Regardless I'm happy to switch Gameworks support for better DX12 and Vulkan. I've also got a 1700 so like the idea of a unified solution.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Less and less companies using Gameworks. Unfortunately Nvidia still has their claws deep. Unisoft for example. Wild lands, Watchdogs 2. Then For honour etc etc.... Hope Vega won't be gimped to bad by Gameworks.

Regardless I'm happy to switch Gameworks support for better DX12 and Vulkan. I've also got a 1700 so like the idea of a unified solution.

No need to worry too much. Gameworks is finally being made opensource for the a lot of the libraries in it.
It means AMD will finally gain access to some of the Source Code to optimise for it in their drivers.

https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworks-open-source

It's not everything, but it's a start!

 

[harney]

No need to worry too much. Gameworks is finally being made opensource for the a lot of the libraries in it.
It means AMD will finally gain access to some of the Source Code to optimise for it in their drivers.

https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworks-open-source

It's not everything, but it's a start!

Was going to point this out Tom @ Nvidia stated this on PC per about a month ago ...Yes its a start ..

The question is why are they doing this ..Is GIMP WORKS 2 about to arrive

 

[Curlyriff]

Was going to point this out Tom @ Nvidia stated this on PC per about a month ago ...Yes its a start ..

The question is why are they doing this ..Is GIMP WORKS 2 about to arrive

I feel it is more to do with the actual number of devs really using Gameworks. It has peaked at the number of devs that have tried it. Alternatives are already out there and being used or in the works from others.

A good number of devs appear to be using their own from their own engines for instance too.

 

[DragonQ]

I don't is it's posted yet but MS has started blocking windows 7 and Ryzen.
Windows 7 update want's to install KB4015549 plus some other updates. I've hidden them so MS won't block Ryzen

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/patch_tuesday_mess/

Sadly, the way that patches are now bundled into one package rather than all separate means it's probably not possible to just not install the Ryzen blocker patch; you'll be missing other important security fixes too.