Bethesda is an AMD partner and yet it is very telling that you don't even consider how popular the games they make - FO4 made something like $750 million in its first day(its also sci-fi fantasy). Most games don't thread perfectly,and most engines don't do the same,so whilst AMD is chasing the future ,Intel,etc will just steal sales AMD should be taking away from them. So if AMD wants to maximise it sales,then not trying to push its own partners to improve performance with its own CPUs only affects itself. You think FO4 is bad - look at Hitman,which is AMD sponsored:
https://img.purch.com/r/600x450/aHR...ZL1ovNzIxODM1L29yaWdpbmFsL2ltYWdlMDAyLnBuZw==
https://tpucdn.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i5_8400/images/hitman_1920_1080_min.png
Look at where a Core i5 8400 lands relative to a Ryzen 5 1600X as both should roughly boost to 3.6GHZ~3.8GHZ out of the box on the stock cooler. This is a DX12 game,and obviously is using upto six cores looking at the scaling. The difference between the Ryzen 5 and the Core i5 8400 is much greater than the IPC difference. Yep,probably another optimisation issue.
So this is also somewhat on AMD - if they can't get their own partners to optimise their own CPUs after nearly a year,who the heck will?? If AMD wants to maximise their sales,they need to do their legwork against an incumbant. Also plonking tech into short FPS games whilst cool won't do much for them. See Wolfenstein II or Prey 2 anywhere in the top50 steam games list now?? Nope,so that effort is only temporary since they are FPS games. Many of the games some of us mention are much longer term,and have playthroughs in the 100s of hours,and are relevant for much longer for most gamers. Maybe you need to look at Nvidia(and to a lesser degree Intel) and how they seem to be involved in sponsoring or incorporating tech into such "unsexy" games. Numbers and longevity. I honestly hope that Far Cry 5 which is apparently using FP16 and looks to be sponsored by AMD RTG,does have Ryzen CPU optimisations from the start,as the last Far Cry released in 2016,ie,Far Cry Primal didn't scale well with more cores.
In the end if AMD wants more people to buy it CPUs it needs to put effort into optimising for current games,not just ones being released in the future in another year or two,since by that time Ryzen will be old hat,as Ryzen 2 or Ryzen 3 will be released. Some of those Core i5 8400 victories shouldn't be so large at all,especially for a CPU running at 3.8GHZ or thereabouts. If I need to wait for the true potential of Ryzen to be revealed in future games,I might as well just skip Ryzen,Ryzen+ and so on and go straight onto Ryzen 2 when hopefully these future games will be released.
TBH,I think they are falling into the same trap as what is doing their GPU division in. They try to aim for future tech,which takes time to actually get incorporated into many games,whilst most games end up using current and older tech and Nvidia wins by default. So they are ignoring current games since they are looking at future releases,but at the expense of current games where the hardware is not performing as good as it should be. If Ryzen performed as well in gaming as it did in non-gaming,then it would be another kettle of fish. Remember when AMD dominated with the Athlon,Athlon XP and Athlon 64,it was not only because they would be good in future games,but also since they beat Intel in current ones(or at least matched them).
Anyway,I have argued too much about this,so we should agree to disagree on this and let it be.
Knowing me,despite my moaning I will probably just end up getting Ryzen 2 anyway unless I am forced to upgrade earlier.
Yeah,its annoying but I think part of the issue is some of the newer games are just not as fun with all the loot crate crap,etc so I end up going back to older games. I mean even Mass Effect:Andromeda which actually used the Frostbite engine,so scales well with cores,etc was a pretty game but EA totally and utterly have destroyed Bioware and the series. I was hoping that would be my go to game for the time-being but whereas it was not a bad game,its not as special as the older ones. 2017 was a rubbish year for games IMHO. I even tried playing some ARK again,as its somewhat better optimised,but it seems UE4 based games are a bit hit and miss on using more threads too,which is not an excuse for a modern engine IMHO. Its what makes me worried about the System Shock remake this year.
OTH,Metro Exodus should show reasonable core scaling if they are using the same engine as in the Redux games,so I think that should be OK.