id Software CTO talks about a Ryzen optimised game engine

[HEXUS]

Upcoming id tech will make the most of Ryzen CPU cores/threads and the Vega GPU.

Read more.

[Otherhand]

That's good news. I love to see leaps forward like this, although unfortunately I won't benefit from it directly given that I didn't buy AMD (and we'll all still be playing near enough the same game aside from the rendering). If it helps AMD increase its market share, that's good for everyone too.

[fend_oblivion]

This is great news indeed. Better competition means better prices and deals for customers.

[shaithis]

The problem is, you need every developer to do this.....I'm still at the point where I'd prefer to buy something that everything is optimised for out-of-the-box......surely AMD could have kept certain architectural features in-line with Intel so that every engine and piece of code didn't need specific Ryzen optimisations?

[Primey0]

Sorry but I'm not going to invest in a CPU that promises future support from developers. Publishers/developers can be extremely lazy when it comes to pc games, you really think they all are going to go out of their way to specifically optimise for Ryzen? Ryzen might be best for id software games but I want a CPU that is good on all games not certain games. That's why Intel will be my future CPU.

[Corky34]

The way some people are talking it's almost like playing games on Ryzen should be compared with a flicker book.

[bridges009]

Sorry but I'm not going to invest in a CPU that promises future support from developers. Publishers/developers can be extremely lazy when it comes to pc games, you really think they all are going to go out of their way to specifically optimise for Ryzen? Ryzen might be best for id software games but I want a CPU that is good on all games not certain games. That's why Intel will be my future CPU.

The future (and present) is more than 4 cores 8 threads and Intel charge absurd artificial premiums for that right now. There's no game than Ryzen is "not good" at.

[DanceswithUnix]

The problem is, you need every developer to do this.....I'm still at the point where I'd prefer to buy something that everything is optimised for out-of-the-box......surely AMD could have kept certain architectural features in-line with Intel so that every engine and piece of code didn't need specific Ryzen optimisations?

Meanwhile, it is Intel's job to introduce new instructions and get software tuned to work best on their CPU.

These are companies trying to make money, not trying to be nice to consumers.

[scaryjim]

T....surely AMD could have kept certain architectural features in-line with Intel so that every engine and piece of code didn't need specific Ryzen optimisations? ...

It's not really a case of making Ryzen specific optimisations; the article doesn't even mention a single Ryzen-sepcific optimisation. It just says the next engine will be more parallel, and Ryzen's higher thread count will get the best out of it.

The ideal situation is for developers to make no vendor-specific optimisations. The issue for AMD for the last decade or more is that most developers will have been working on Intel systems, so they're going to have automatically optimised for Intel (even if they didn't do it consciously) just to get the game running as fast as possible on their dev systems; and AMD processors were so far behind they probably didn't care whether they were getting every last drop of performance.

Ryzen does share a lot more architectural features with Intel than the construction and cat cores did. I wouldn't be surprised if some of its performance jump over FX is because it's actually being used more efficiently by the code.

[kalniel]

Absolutely - the article specifies the benefit is the number of cores for the money.

[Iota]

The way some people are talking it's almost like playing games on Ryzen should be compared with a flicker book.

Honestly, I don't need to play games at 200fps. As long as I can get somewhere close to 60fps and more if possible, that'll do me fine. Considering the price difference, I'm more inclined to go with an AMD build a bit later this year.

[nobodyspecial]

"Duffy says that while AMD Ryzen gives good performance 'out of the box' at 1080p and 1440p the id developers are tuning software for great performance in 4K and even 8K resolutions."

So basically admitting what we already know. Gaming where we all play (>95% of us anyway) is not going to do you any favors vs intel, but there's hope for the future at a point in time where you'll likely be on a whole other technology anyway. 4K is not even on my radar for my next monitor (coming soon, likely within the year) and 8K? ROFL. Please, give me a break.

This was NOT the case the last time AMD took the lead for 3yrs where they won almost EVERYTHING out of the box, and gaming across the board for years. I hope ryzen rev2.0 (supposedly starting with the 16 core desktop chip coming soon with 399 chipset or whatever) fixes gaming for ALL games not just the ones a dev decides to optimize for specifically if AMD pays them to, because AMD doesn't have much money to get this "paying" crap done. Hopefully they sell to a large portion of the HOME desktop market (meaning a lot of gamers, they reached 50% before of home users, and about zero enterprise), which would force people to code without PAYMENT, but that remains to be seen and could take a few years.

The biggest issues for AMD before was Intel and a hard limit of 20% share they could achieve due to fab limits. I think it's a lot tougher for Intel to push around people today (to the extent they did before anyway), and the best part is AMD has no fab limits so can QUICKLY capture market in a year if they're selling something people really want. They MUST fix games on rev2.0 coming THIS YEAR or they will be slowed down a lot. Users like me want what they are promising with 2.0 (fixed games). They already have me hands down on handbrake use, but I need more than one app I use a lot.

It seems AMD clearly knows the weakness of their chips (currently anyway) and is telling devs to sound off on 4k/8k that most of us won't use or in 95% of the cases will be shown to be gpu bound anyway thus hiding their weaknesses. I don't buy future proof tech, I buy what WINS TODAY TECH with a very small hope for the future to be ok...LOL. If you buy the other way around you can easily get the shiv in the back. The message seems to be buy the loser today and at some point it will come into power (how did that workout with FX 8 core chips? yeah, still waiting), WE PROMISE. Umm, no thanks.

Don't get me wrong I hope they succeed (own stock...ROFL), just think I'll wait as long as possible for gen2 and hope they get it right. I want to buy AMD, but currently I'm thinking I'm really just hoping AMD gets me an Intel discount on an 8-12 core by xmas. Sad, but seems to be the case currently. That said, I think AMD will sell to a lot of workstation users and hopefully that paves the way for a greater GEN2 gamer chip. It sounds like they were already working on it knowing they had a problem across the board for gamers (as reviews have shown). That's encouraging for me Great cpu for workstations already in many cases.

[afiretruck]

... It seems AMD clearly knows the weakness of their chips (currently anyway) and is telling devs to sound off on 4k/8k...

This. AMD know their Ryzen CPUs aren't yet quite as good as Intel's for gaming (either due to lack of software optimisation [single-threaded or multithreaded] , or Intel just has slightly better hardware) so they're trying to mask the issue by showing that it can at least saturate the GPU with ultra-high resolution gaming, thus making the GPU bottle-neck the CPU.

Now, with regards to software optimisations, there are 2 issues at play here:
1) Ryzen is a brand new uArchitecture, with a subtly different behaviour compared to Intel's hardware per-core.
2) Developers suddenly have up to twice as many cores & threads to play with on mainstream hardware.

Point 1 is a difficult one to deal with as, as other people have said before me, most devs won't have touched AMD hardware for years, let alone be even aware of how Ryzen works under the hood. So they need *some* time to play around with it and tweak their games/game engines to behave properly on it.

Point 2 really shows just how much both Intel and software/video games developers both have been holding us back the last half-decade. Multi-threading is the future of high-performance software, but it's usually *very* difficult to transition a single-threaded (or fixed dual/quad threaded) game engine to a scalable multi-threaded one without having to completely redesign the engine's architecture.

Graphics APIs like OpenGL (don't know about DX11, never programmed with it) being only really operable from a single thread does make this harder. Sure, you can do some clever tricks to offload work to other threads, but that doesn't really solve the problem.

Vulkan and DX12 are supposed to be very multi-threading friendly, so that'll help developers want to think in a multi-threading way, at least, but the technology is still very new, so it'll be a while before people default to using them.

Add to the above the fact that proper multi-threading programming is significantly harder than single-threaded programming and you have a situation where of course it's going to take a damn while before we see our 8C/16T being properly utilised by most games.

Most developers aren't going to waste precious time rearchitecting already-released games to use 4 - 32 threads. It's not lazy, it's sensible. This is one of the big reasons why AMD Ryzen still lags behind Intel for gaming. I bet you, if Intel keeps up it's stupidity on low core/thread counts and AMD pushes ahead with it's 8+ cores in the mainstream sector, we'll see AMD Zen-based CPUs pulling ahead of Intel in the games performance charts within the next year, or so.

Final point: We're comparing first-generation Zen to 7th generation I-series. We will very likely see a big leap in single-thread performance going from Ryzen to Zen-2, much like the leap from 1st gen I-series to 2nd gen.

[nobodyspecial]

Praying you're right afiretruck. Really want to see gen2 fix the gaming and get glowing reviews. Other than that they are seemingly sitting on a winner (for workstation use at least for now which should sell enough for more R&D), or will at some point soon. It seems Zen2 is coming first with 16 core then hopefully across the board (and in APU, don't even bother with ZEN1 apus AMD!). Just make sure you have zen2 be compatible with at least some of the first buyers boards so they have somewhere to run for a fix in a year or two etc.

I think we'll see Vulkan take off big time once the current in-dev dx12 games are on the shelves. Now that vulkan is an option, no reason to start a NEW dx12 game again. I think more devs will follow Id ans the star citizen devs by xmas after whatever they are working on now is complete. I'm hoping to kick my windows habit at some point if this really takes off. I'll still probably be on the IT treadmill for a while for msft, but if the other side looks good enough, I could see switching that too, over to linux (certs worth more there these days anyway in many cases).

Good points, good day

[DanceswithUnix]

This was NOT the case the last time AMD took the lead for 3yrs where they won almost EVERYTHING out of the box, and gaming across the board for years.

But that was against the P4, and the P4 was a complete dog. This is more like the Athlon vs P3 days, trading blows in the race to 1GHz chips. If you are waiting for a clear winner, I honestly doubt there will ever be one.

On the upside, that means there aren't any clear losers either.

I presume Dell isn't selling Ryzen based machines yet? Until that happens, there won't be mass workstation sales of Ryzen and Intel will win in the end just like they did last time.

In the meantime, I just took all the money I could have spent on a new mobo/CPU and spent it on a 3D printer. It seemed more interesting

[kalniel]

In the meantime, I just took all the money I could have spent on a new mobo/CPU and spent it on a 3D printer. It seemed more interesting

I bought a bike