AMD Zen

[Spock]

Well, CPUs are not very relevant for games in general, with very few exceptions. So broadwell single threat performance (that's what Zen is currently compared to) is totally sufficient for most games and the mobo and CPU might be much cheaper. Remember that Intel boards are also more expensive too because Intel forced their board partners to make the pins for the socket.

 

Vega 10 has some really great architectural stuff btw. fp16 double performance for example (something NVidia promised but didn't deliver). NVidia has better marketing (as seen in these forums) but AMD certainly has better architecture in the GPU department.

[Mator]

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. In terms of performance for gaming (which is what the vast majority of us care about around here), I just don't see it being a huge winner or leap ahead. They're basically just catching up to Intel. The only thing Ryzen might have going for it is the performance/value ratios. If they hit the market at a cheaper price point than Intel offers, then that is the only thing I see sending gamers back to AMD (for the CPU, Nvidia still holds the market for video cards). So far, I have not been impressed with what I've seen. It's just marginally better and isn't anything that would coax me over to the AMD side.

 

For those that do a lot of audio/video/encoding type work, Ryzen might be more of gem. But for gamers, I'm just not seeing anything impressive right now.

One big thing you're glossing over however is streamers.  Those are gamers who really benefit from mutli-threading performance.  :)

[Nebulous112]

Vega 10 has some really great architectural stuff btw. fp16 double performance for example (something NVidia promised but didn't deliver). NVidia has better marketing (as seen in these forums) but AMD certainly has better architecture in the GPU department.

I like how AdoredTV put it. Paraphrasing: "AMD consistently has better new technology and architecture, but as it can take years for developers to utilize the features, the performance just isn't there."

 

Nvidia just focuses on clockspeed, and the performance (today) shows that. Regardless of the huge "mindshare" advantage that Nvidia has (another thing that AdoredTV mentions quite frequently).

 

 

[Spock]

I heavily disagree with the conclusion of the video.

It's like saying WV cars are really good because the Lamborghini by the same company is really fast. But vast majority of people doesn't want to afford a Lamborghini.

 

The high end marked for GPUs gets huge marketing attention but for the vast majority of customers, it is really irrelevant. What really is important are the 200-300$ GPUs and how long they stay relevant. That is the segment and use case where NVidia cards are consistently worse for the past 4 years.

 

The points about power efficiency mentioned in the second are only relevant for gaming btw. If you want real power efficiency, look at Furmark benchmarks.

 

[edit] Sorry, tuned it down a little. There is just too much misinformation out there, I find it annoying at times.

Edited January 23, 2017 by Spock

[Spock]

After the most glaring bugs are ironed out, Ryzen's performance is pretty impressive. And given their inferior process, their design is also more power efficient then Intel's.

 

Ryzen is at the moment hardware for tinkerers though. If you want your stuff to 'just work', get an Intel CPU. The high end parts are very interesting for productivity, because Intel's 8 Core solutions are so excessively overpriced. For high end gaming, Intel is just faster. Ryzen has the better bang for your buck and the Mainboards are cheaper.

 

Since Intel hasn't managed to get much more performance out of their past few generations, I expect the next AMD generation to really catch up. They will hopefully iron out most of the weaknesses of their architecture and platform, in that case it will probably become an easy recommendation for budget builds. I doubt they will catch up with Intel at gaming performance any time soon. I'm personally looking forward to the Skylake-x hexacore.

[Guest]