Ryzen performance update arrives for Ashes of the Singularity

I've searched all over the web but there appears to be very little interesting news today. There was the Samsung Galaxy S8 announcement yesterday but there are already plenty of sites that report that sort of news so I no longer cover the general consumer electronics news as I sometimes did in the past. So yeah, maybe some interesting news will pop up in the coming hours but don't be surprised if today's news roundup remains relatively small.

There's one thing of interest though, and that's the Ryzen performance update for Ashes of the Singularity. AMD cooperated with game developer Oxide to optimize the game for the new Ryzen architecture and this resulted in pretty massive performance increases. AMD hinted we'd see big performance increases for games and after last week's Ryzen patch for Dota 2 there's now a second game with Ryzen optimizations.

PC Perspective ran some benchmarks and found that the patch increases 1080p gaming performance by as much as 31 percent!

These are substantial performance improvements with the new engine code! At both 2400 MHz and 3200 MHz memory speeds, and at both High and Extreme presets in the game (all running in DX12 for what that’s worth), the gaming performance on the GPU-centric is improved. At the High preset (which is the setting that AMD used in its performance data for the press release), we see a 31% jump in performance when running at the higher memory speed and a 22% improvement with the lower speed memory. Even when running at the more GPU-bottlenecked state of the Extreme preset, that performance improvement for the Ryzen processors with the latest Ashes patch is 17-20%!

The site heard the Ryzen performance boost is the result of around 400 developer hours of work to optimize the Nitrous Engine for Ryzen. Here's a bit of general background info about the process:

So what exactly is happening to the engine with v26118? I haven’t had a chance to have an in-depth conversation with anyone at AMD or Oxide yet on the subject, but at a high level, I was told that this is what happens when instructions and sequences are analyzed for an architecture specifically. “For basically 5 years”, I was told, Oxide and other developers have dedicated their time to “instruction traces and analysis to maximize Intel performance” which helps to eliminate poor instruction setup. After spending some time with Ryzen and the necessary debug tools (and some AMD engineers), they were able to improve performance on Ryzen without adversely affecting Intel parts.

It's an impressive performance boost but whether many other game devs will be willing to devote time and resources to optimize existing games for Ryzen remains to be seen.