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Intel Meltdown and Specter fixes hampering Intel's gaming performance?

gavinh87 said:
Doesn't a game load into ram before displaying on screen?
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not sure but i can say a lot of games have this when bench marking where the minimum will be stupidly low and it happens right at the begining. Look at the first batman game and the metro games on top of my head they both also do it where you have a 2fps minimum but the actual benchmark never dips below a reasonable figure.
 
where I think anandtech was flawed is it looks like they ran the intel chips at factory clocks, given thats where a big part of intel's advantage lies in how user overclockable they are it makes it a bit flawed.

But I think the spectre+meltdown affect is legit.

e.g. the 8600k stock turbo is only 4.3ghz vs the ryzen 2 r5 turbo of 4.2.ghz, but the former can go to 4.8ghz all cores even on a really bad chip which I dont think anandtech did on their tests.
 
It seems not only Anandtech and The Tech Report ran the patches,but Toms Hardware also has,but not fully:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-2700x-review,5571-7.html

Spectre And Meltdown

Our test rigs now include Meltdown And Spectre Variant 1 mitigations. Spectre Variant 2 requires both motherboard firmware/microcode and operating system patches. We have installed the operating system patches for Variant 2.

Today's performance measurements do not include Intel's motherboard firmware mitigations for Spectre Variant 2 though, as we've been waiting for AMD patches to level the playing field. Last week, AMD announced that it’s making the mitigations available to motherboard vendors and OEMs, which the company says should take time to appear in the wild. We checked MSI's website for firmware updates applicable to our X370 platforms when AMD made its announcement, but no new BIOSes were available (and still aren't).

Unfortunately, we were only made aware that Variant 2 mitigations are present in our X470 board's firmware just before launch, precluding us from re-testing the Intel platforms with patches applied. We're working on this now, and plan to post updated results in future reviews.

The lack of Spectre Variant 2 patches in our Intel results likely give the Core CPUs a slight advantage over AMD's patched platforms. But the performance difference should be minimal with modern processors.
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The TH review also places the latest Ryzen CPUs relatively close to the Intel ones.

Also,looking at the tweets regarding AT,its quite possible some reviews have not enabled Precision Boost 2 properly due to the way its presented in the BIOS options:

https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/987026323544649729
 
From what I understand Windows 10 Microsoft includes the microcode updates so they get loaded on boot meaning you can be spectre mitigated "without" an updated bios.
Windows 8 and 7, you "do" need an updated bios tho as Microsoft only includes the patch and "not" the microcode updates.

The reviewers can confirm if they patched by running inspectre. Plenty of win 10 users have ran inspectre without updating their bios and have confirmed they spectre mitigated due to the microsoft distributed microcode updates.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4090007/intel-microcode-updates
https://www.windowscentral.com/micr...microcode-updates-combat-meltdown-and-spectre

So win 7/8 patch only
Win 10 patch+microcode on windows update.
 
chrcoluk said:
From what I understand Windows 10 Microsoft includes the microcode updates so they get loaded on boot meaning you can be spectre mitigated "without" an updated bios.
Windows 8 and 7, you "do" need an updated bios tho as Microsoft only includes the patch and "not" the microcode updates.

The reviewers can confirm if they patched by running inspectre. Plenty of win 10 users have ran inspectre without updating their bios and have confirmed they spectre mitigated due to the microsoft distributed microcode updates.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4090007/intel-microcode-updates
https://www.windowscentral.com/micr...microcode-updates-combat-meltdown-and-spectre

So win 7/8 patch only
Win 10 patch+microcode on windows update.
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They are talking about the level 2 patches. Interestingly enough TH results for gaming are also much closer to Intel than suspected,especially since some of the titles tested are not actually the most friendly to Ryzen.
 
yes this is for type 2.

type 1 is just a mitigation in the browser. Doesnt even need an OS patch.

This script is enhanced over the microsoft script.

https://github.com/vrdse/MeltdownSpectreReport

It checks for type 1 and 2, notice it checks the browsers for type1. (CVE-2017-5753)

Edge/IE
Firefox
Chrome

CVE-2017-5715 is the one patched at the kernel level and requires cpu microcode updates delivered either via bios or OS.

CVE-2017-5754 is meltdown, requires kernel patch but no need for microcode update.

5753 in the future might be mitigated via the bios/kernel, but seems its not the way its been targeted now, if we look at another OS FreeBSD they have nothing for it.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/SpeculativeExecutionVulnerabilities
 
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chrcoluk said:
yes this is for type 2.

type 1 is just a mitigation in the browser. Doesnt even need an OS patch.
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I dunno then,as I assume the most popular review site in the world,probably has some clue if their Intel systems have the patch,and from what I gather they say they haven't had updates.

Ultimately,the TH review has AMD much closer to Intel too,than expected in games which Ryzen MK1 didn't do so well in. So I don't think its as big a fluke that AMD has made some big gains.

I think people read into the AMD 3% IPC gain,a bit too much. In a number of games it seems somewhat bigger,so I assume uncore improvements seem to be what is helping here. Even the DAW gains in the TR review are huge,and AFAIK that is also more latency dependent like some games,and AMD said there were big cache latency improvements in Ryzen 2.
 
It wouldnt surprise me if half of these reviewers havent a clue if they patched or not, its just how they are.

We know windows 10 is aggressive in its updates, if you install whilst you online, its actually hard to avoid getting patched up.
Windows 10 also includes microcode updates for the latest intel chips.
 
Is it to much to ask of the the tech press and reviewers... for once just bloody once can they manage to get a review out, correct and roughly in line with there peers without having controversies like MCE,XMP, XFR, patches, liquid coolers or quality differences???

I mean for gods sake.. these people are suppose to be telling us what to buy.
 
cat-the-fifth this is how I know the performance impact of "full" spectre mitigation.

Read this post from the lead dragonflybsd dev.

http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2018-January/335643.html

here is a snippet

Performance Loss Matrix
Using Highly concurrent compile test case
INCLUDING MMU ISOLATION
HASWELL SKYLAKE KABYLAKE-U
IBPB=0 IBPB=1 IBPB=0 IBPB=1 IBPB=0 IBPB=1
IBRS=0 4% 16% 2% 19% 2% 19%
IBRS=1 16% 25% 4.4% 17% 4.0% 20%
IBRS=2 62% 64% 25% 34% 21% 31%

Keeping in mind that the default setting will be IBRS=1 IBPB=0. As you can
see, older CPUs such as Haswell are the most impacted, while more recent
CPUs are far less impacted.
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Windows mitigation is same as IBRS=1

IBRS=0 means no spectre protection
1 means kernel mitigated (microsoft did this one)
2 means userland and kernel mitigated, note how expensive it is

I am not sure if microsoft are using IPBP 0 or 1. 1 is apparently only needed if you use virtualisation.

So IBRS 0 and IPBP 0 means just meltdown mitigation.
 
chrcoluk said:
It wouldnt surprise me if half of these reviewers havent a clue if they patched or not, its just how they are.

We know windows 10 is aggressive in its updates, if you install whilst you online, its actually hard to avoid getting patched up.
Windows 10 also includes microcode updates for the latest intel chips.
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I would assume he ran the appropriate utilities to make such a statement,otherwise it would be egg on his face. But it will be easy to see,ie,if he had them already installed,he would see exactly the same performance in later reviews!! :p

However,TH measured quite large cache latency reductions even bigger than what AMD suggested,and that fits in what we are seeing with some workloads.

Remember AT tested both their platforms at stock clockspeds with only officially supported RAM speeds(2666MHZ for Intel and 2933MHZ for AMD),and also fully patched up both systems.

I would expect once overclocked with fast RAM,Intel would eek out a victory.

But like I said TH also has Ryzen unexpectedly getting close to Intel in a number of games which are not really the best running on AMD,I wouldn't expect it to,and they overclocked everything too and ran fast RAM for both platforms.

First-gen Ryzen processors don't have much memory overclocking headroom, so we're still testing tuned X370 platforms at DDR4-3200. However, the X470 platform was remarkably stable at higher data rates with Ryzen 7 2700X. So, we settled on DDR4-3466 with 14-14-14-34 timings (though we're confident that more time to tune would yield even higher overclocks). We also ran our overclocked Intel processors at DDR4-3466.
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Even FO4,which has zero Ryzen patches showed much bigger than average improvements.

chrcoluk said:
cat-the-fifth this is how I know the performance impact of "full" spectre mitigation.

Read this post from the lead dragonflybsd dev.

http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2018-January/335643.html

here is a snippet



Windows mitigation is same as IBRS=1

IBRS=0 means no spectre protection
1 means kernel mitigated (microsoft did this one)
2 means userland and kernel mitigated, note how expensive it is

I am not sure if microsoft are using IPBP 0 or 1. 1 is apparently only needed if you use virtualisation.

So IBRS 0 and IPBP 0 means just meltdown mitigation.
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No wonder I am frakked with IB,and most review sites won't care about testing older CPUs with the security updates.
 
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chrcoluk said:
Yes anandtech are sure of what they did, I meant the others who simply have no comment on it.
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Well,give it a few weeks,I am sure if its a schoolboy mistake on the part of AT and TH(or others) we will find out,and we will get some more detailed testing from reviewers and users to get a better impression of what is going on.

But TBH,I am pleasantly surprised at the overall improvements in only 12 months. It makes me wonder if AMD Ryzen could get close to 5GHZ when overclocked,where that would place Intel,as I think that is still where Intel has an advantage overall.
 
On windows 10 it will be almost everyone.

Windows 7 and 8 who knows. XP pretty much no one.

On 8.1 I am unpatched on gaming rig. Patched on laptop. (meltdown only on laptop)

Windows 10 actually is not cut and dry, only the latest fall creators update is getting the microcode updates, I think the older builds of windows 10 is similar to 7 and 8 that they get the patches but not the microcode updates. So if you on say Windows 10 LTSB you might have better performance as will be just meltdown and no spectre mitigation, or win 10 pro with feature updates delayed as another example.

This last bit possibly could also be affecting some reviewers.
 
The variation in reviews tells us a lot. There are a lot of variables and a lot of reviewers methodology is not scientific. Imo the whole review industry is too caught up with being first or being sponsored by vested interests.

I'd like to see some double blind tests. Two PC's random members of the public playing a variety of games and their impression of the experience. I bet most wouldn't be able to tell ;)
 
People also need to remember that us who overclock CPUs are actually a tiny minority, so Anandtech reviews represent what a vast majority of people will experience.

a lot of people will buy OEM setups with rubbish coolers and stock clocks, intact far more than people who will buy overclocked and decently cooled setups

Their review shows what the average Joe will see today, with stock settings and current patches etc.

You may not like it, but that is life, for the average gamer who buys an off the shelf pc this is going to be the reality.

One of the guys I work with dropped almost £1500 on an off the shelf PC world machine last year, when I saw what was inside I laughed, they are so badly built but it plays WoW for him at the settings he wants so he is happy.

These are the types of people who these reviews represent, the average gamer.
 
SiDeards73 said:
People also need to remember that us who overclock CPUs are actually a tiny minority, so Anandtech reviews represent what a vast majority of people will experience.

a lot of people will buy OEM setups with rubbish coolers and stock clocks, intact far more than people who will buy overclocked and decently cooled setups

Their review shows what the average Joe will see today, with stock settings and current patches etc.

You may not like it, but that is life, for the average gamer who buys an off the shelf pc this is going to be the reality.

One of the guys I work with dropped almost £1500 on an off the shelf PC world machine last year, when I saw what was inside I laughed, they are so badly built but it plays WoW for him at the settings he wants so he is happy.

These are the types of people who these reviews represent, the average gamer.
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Agreed, I know someone who buys an off the shelf PC every 5 years or so. i7 and 1080 doesn't change anything and plays CS at 400fps 1080p on pretty much the lowest settings, bizarre but not that uncommon!
 
Troezar said:
Agreed, I know someone who buys an off the shelf PC every 5 years or so. i7 and 1080 doesn't change anything and plays CS at 400fps 1080p on pretty much the lowest settings, bizarre but not that uncommon!
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Yep my mate ended up with an i5 non K, stock cooler and ref 1070, 12gb of ram. Worst of all the cases are next to useless if you want to upgrade at all. I told him for the money he spent he should have had a much better PC, worse still he bought it literally a week before the Ryzen 1 release.

But this is the common man who wants a PC to game on as he has evolved from a console and wants to dabble, they see Intel i5 inside, 12GB of Ram and Nvidia on the box and the sales representative says yeah that will play WoW with all the settings turned up and I guess they aren't really being untrue, it will play WoW on max settings, but it won't be very pleasant lol
 
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