At this year’s PAX West, Joker got a chance to talk with AMD’s Don Woligroski who shared some interesting new information about the future CPUs of AMD, as well as the ongoing optimizations that AMD is trying to bring to PC games.
According to Woligroski, AMD’s recent Ryzen CPUs were ‘the worst case scenario’ and the red team will improve IPC performance as well as clock frequencies.
“I’ve said this before and I think it holds true. Zen, Ryzen, was the worst case scenario. It was a brand new architecture on a brand new node. So the worst case scenario we could’ve possibly had, and it’s pretty good. You can get to over 4.GHz.
We’re definitely working on improving, our engineers [are] really smart guys and things are looking better as we go along. I can’t talk to specifics on IPC but that’s an area of focus. We’ve got clock speed headroom to take advantage of and we’ve got tweaks to make sure performance for each clock is better.”
But what about games? We’ve known for quite a while that AMD is working with some publishers/developers in order to further optimize their games for Ryzen CPUs. Thankfully, Woligroski shed some light on what is currently going on.
“For games that are already released, our focus is making sure if they have a problem on Ryzen processors, which some do you’ll see a big performance delta, you’re like why? Ryzen is pretty fast and we’ll go and engage with the developer. We did it for Dota 2, Rise Of The Tomb raider and we just find out what was wrong.
For future looking stuff, it’s that chicken or egg scenario. When you have more threads and cores available the guys will start developing for it. We certainly have engineers that we hand out to guys who are developing games and our partners like Bethesda have been really great. They’re like how do we take advantage of this hardware? and we send guys in to say here’s how you do it. Here’s some ideas and it’s just a feedback loop. It just gets better and better. We finally have the APIs, now they’re going to learn how to use them. It’s not an instant ON. But then it’s inevitable. Next couple of years you’ll start seeing people doing it, great advances. And then it becomes the norm and everybody starts doing that. And then maybe in five years it’s 64 threads, who knows. It’s that beautiful upgrade path that’s for so long has been a plateau that no one has been pushing harder. I think it’s going to benefit us all.”
It’s worth noting that AMD’s future plans will also benefit Intel’s CPUs as their additional CPU cores will be also used (which is great for all PC gamers). As such, it remains to be seen whether AMD’s Ryzen 2 or Ryzen 3 CPUs will be able to compete with Intel’s future offerings.
Woligroski concluded that AMD is not a one it wonder and that it has some really good stuff coming.
“We threw down in 2017. We’ve seen our competitor starting to wake up and respond and we’re not just going to roll over. We have more stuff to come, we’ve got really good stuff coming. We’re not a one hit wonder, we’re keeping the pressure on for sometime. It’ll be a great 2018,. It was a great 2017 and we’ll see how things turn out.”
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
The thing is. I don’t care if it’s AMD, Intel, or Nvidia talking about optimization. It’s about Hardware company and Developer relations. If the Developer is not on board with hardware companies dealing with optimization for a game / program. Then all the talk about Optimization means nothing.
Just because you see a logo pop up means nothing if the work is not put into it. Drivers are good for making a game / program stable. But they can’t do miracle work.
This time around i think Amd is even sending engineers to these devs to help them, i think its safe to say we saw some nice patches for ryzen lately. Just not enough.
They should have done that with AMD FX, it wouldn’t have ended how it did, the AMD FX Series had lots of unused power during it’s lifetime.
Developers totally ignored the AMD FX Series and only optimized for Intel, EA was among the only Publishers who optimized for AMD FX.
Frostbite takes advantage of the AMD FX architecture, as it can be seen in the benchmarks.
the FX series simply lacking in IPC department. no matter what you do the IPC still important not just the core count. hardware unboxed did a test between FX8370 vs 2500K (both at stock). even in mirror edge and BF1 (tested both in SP and MP) the 2500K beats FX8370.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76-8-4qcpPo
It has been noted by many that a Phenom III would have been a better choice then bulldozer. Bulldozer was the worst CPU launch in history i think its even worse then Pentium 4 cause at least Intel was close to Amd even if it had to be 1Ghz more to do it. Where even a FX 9590 could barely take a haswell I3 in games that even use 6-8 cores like BF4. Make no mistake these CPUs are terrible.
To add to that point, they found in UE4 FX chips took 6x longer in order to process sounds, especially in titles like SQUAD, simply due to the low IPC. This was regardless if you had a sound card or not due to the sound API used in most engines (XAudio2) since the release of VISTA which forces all sound processing to be done by the CPU First, regardless, and then sent through a dedicated sound card, if present, to be processed again.
FX had such an abysmal marketshare they couldn’t get developers to do so. The API’s weren’t in line with having the amount of play in order to use all the additional threads. Vast majority of work going into RyZen optimization are outside of merely thread management. The thread management today, in things even like DX11, compared to when FX was released and ‘prevalent’ is entirely different. It simply wouldn’t have amounted to much back then.
And at the same time when Nvidia does it the entire AMD crowd starts moaning and pointing fingers.
This is more about CPU optimization. Not changing the content itself in the game. Such as gamesworks which i have no issue with either as long as its done right.
I can in no way see how Amd fanboys can be defending the GPU division lol. I wish Amd would separate themselves more so they can focus on Ryzen.
Intel and Nvidia are two completely different companies the more i see Intel the more i think of IBM back in the day vs Apple.
All profit no care about technology least with Nvidia i actually think they do care about improving tech that’s why they keep doing it when they have no competition where Intel stood still.
RyZen is a bit different, very little driver work is done. All optimizations for games with CPU’s are done primarily on the title, engine and API front.
So my enemy Joker is now becoming also a hardware developer instead of just a criminal?
Yeah once again the herald of gaming is here to save us, loving the good work they’re doing with Vega for gamers, lmao.
LOL
i7 7700k still the KING of the Gaming beating all i7/i9 CPU’s in games and Ryzeshet
A new king is coming..8700K..
has the same IPC but again its tons better in productivity 8700k
ill get i7 7700k because it got cheaper / i can use 3600+ RAM so insane IPC over there u good to go
Ryzen is a lot better then you think man. Amd is closer today then they were with Intel in 2011
Newest Ryzen its equal or worse than a 5 years old i7 3770 non K in terms of gaming kinda sad tbh if u are AMD
It’s IPC is between sandy and haswell in gaming its always higher then sandy i ran countless tests at times its even ahead of haswell a little but not near kabylake.
Issue is when running on slow memory ryzen really bottlenecks a 1080 and 1080ti.
OC to 3.9ghz or so one should expect it to perform like a 4.6-4.7ghz sandy CPU.
1500X review at KitGuru is my favorite review as it compares it to sandy-bridge.
Also Intel’s 7700K OC isn’t that much better then a 2600K OC in gaming results take a look at gamernexus review.
I run one and i have yet to have a terrible experience in major IPC+frequency based games once i got 3200mhz stable and 3.9Ghz OC it really is nice.
You remember i used to own a 8350fx and was wondering why i had such a low frame rate in far cry 3 lol, bulldozer family of processors where such junk.
LOL. You’re thinking 8350.
Considering Rysen usage hasn’t gone over 50% in any game, you’re up to a surprise as optimization takes place.
its true about that
Silviu go back to trolling on geforce page and dont come here
so you are one of the users who got Ryzen
RIP mate
PS: this is a gaming website and not a productivity or streaming one
so i7 7700k still the king and it will be for a long time in terms of gaming horsepower
I opted for intel this time around due to ryzen’s early issues but i’m definitely very likely to grab a next gen ryzen.
Yeah, we listened to you AMD, and we got a nice pile of mediocrity called Vega. Your AMD chips are still behind gaming for intel… Also..a hearty lol escaped my lips at this ” So the worst case scenario we could’ve possibly had, and it’s pretty good. You can get to over 4.GHz.” Congrats to achieving clock speeds that have been around for over a decade.
Must be tough seeing that Intel stock coming down, eh?
Must be tough when AMD does nothing but play catch up while ultimately screwing the consumer “I.E” you and I for example.
Also AMD Stock price 12$, Intel 32$ and going up.. You were saying?
If you are into monopolies, then be my guest.
Not as tough as sitting there with a over priced GPU with AIO milk cooling that hardly keeps up with Nvidia’s 2016 GTX1070 tech.
They better. Right now the entire ryzen line up fals behind intels previous gen in things like gaming.