AMD acknowledges lackluster 1080p gaming performance on Ryzen, promises improvement

Probably the biggest letdown of AMD's Ryzen 7 launch is how the processor performs in gaming benchmarks. While in some areas Ryzen outperforms Intel's fastest CPU at just half the price, the sad reality is that when the GPU is not the bottleneck, the current Ryzen lineup does not stack up well versus cheaper options from Intel's Kaby lake series.

AMD acknowledges the issues with 1080p gaming and in a statement to PC Perspective, John Taylor, CVP of Marketing, explains Ryzen gaming performance is only going to get better. AMD blames lack of optimization for Ryzen for the poor results seen in gaming benchmarks:

“As we presented at Ryzen Tech Day, we are supporting 300+ developer kits with game development studios to optimize current and future game releases for the all-new Ryzen CPU. We are on track for 1000+ developer systems in 2017. For example, Bethesda at GDC yesterday announced its strategic relationship with AMD to optimize for Ryzen CPUs, primarily through Vulkan low-level API optimizations, for a new generation of games, DLC and VR experiences.

Oxide Games also provided a public statement today on the significant performance uplift observed when optimizing for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU design – optimizations not yet reflected in Ashes of the Singularity benchmarking. Creative Assembly, developers of the Total War series, made a similar statement today related to upcoming Ryzen optimizations.

CPU benchmarking deficits to the competition in certain games at 1080p resolution can be attributed to the development and optimization of the game uniquely to Intel platforms – until now. Even without optimizations in place, Ryzen delivers high, smooth frame rates on all “CPU-bound” games, as well as overall smooth frame rates and great experiences in GPU-bound gaming and VR. With developers taking advantage of Ryzen architecture and the extra cores and threads, we expect benchmarks to only get better, and enable Ryzen excel at next generation gaming experiences as well.

Game performance will be optimized for Ryzen and continue to improve from at-launch frame rate scores.” John Taylor, AMD

So far only Oxide and Creative Assembly have issued statement that they're working on improving Ryzen support. It's unknown how many other game developers plan to release Ryzen performance updates, or how much performance could be gained from this. Still, this begs the question why AMD didn't work with developers to sort these things out before the launch. I think the answer to this is that Ryzen is a brand new platform, and that adoption is going to take longer than a lot of people hope because these sort of things take an awful lot of time.

“Oxide games is incredibly excited with what we are seeing from the Ryzen CPU. Using our Nitrous game engine, we are working to scale our existing and future game title performance to take full advantage of Ryzen and its 8-core, 16-thread architecture, and the results thus far are impressive. These optimizations are not yet available for Ryzen benchmarking. However, expect updates soon to enhance the performance of games like Ashes of the Singularity on Ryzen CPUs, as well as our future game releases.” - Brad Wardell, CEO Stardock and Oxide

"Creative Assembly is committed to reviewing and optimizing its games on the all-new Ryzen CPU. While current third-party testing doesn’t reflect this yet, our joint optimization program with AMD means that we are looking at options to deliver performance optimization updates in the future to provide better performance on Ryzen CPUs moving forward. " – Creative Assembly, Developers of the Multi-award Winning Total War Series