AMD's Su says patches will boost Ryzen gaming performance: It 'will only get better'

From PC World: AMD executives said Thursday that the company is working with developers to ensure the “vital optimizations” required to boost the disappointing performance of its Ryzen chip in low-end gaming applications.

In PCWorld.com’s review, AMD’s Ryzen competed well when paired with a high-end GPU, in graphics-bound games that could take advantage of Ryzen’s multicore capabilities. At the more common 1080p resolutions, though, Ryzen struggled.

That will change, AMD chief executive Lisa Su promised fans in a series of posts on Reddit. “We hear people on wanting to see improved 1080p performance and we fully expect that Ryzen performance in 1080p will only get better as developers get more time with ‘Zen,’” Su wrote. “We have over 300+ developers now working with ‘Zen’ and several of the developers for Ashes of Singularity and Total [War:] Warhammer are actively optimizing now.”

AMD’s claims that it had elevated Ryzen’s instructions per clock more than 50 percent over the previous generation didn’t match up with its, well, surprising lack of performance when tested in real-world gaming. And when Ryzen was beaten by a 5-year-old (overclocked) processor?! Wow. But it’s true that Ryzen is a brand-new architecture, in a PC market dominated by Intel, and that developers are still catching up. Let’s just hope that AMD and developers can patch up Ryzen’s performance to a level users had hoped for.

AMD plans to continue working with motherboard vendors to further refine their BIOSes, and with developers to ensure that game performance matches the competition. Early motherboard BIOSes were “troubled,” Hallock wrote, as disabling features would turn off cores. AMD’s Ryzen also benefits from the “high performance” Windows power setting, which turns off core parking, and from disabling High Precision Event Timers within the BIOS. And, of course, there’s the simple fact that some games use code optimized for AMD’s rival, the Core chips manufactured by Intel.

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