PC_Advisor_Issue_264_July_2017

Feature: Ryzen myths
understand our tCTL offsets to report the
junction temperature automatically,” the
company wrote in a blog post.
Keep in mind, we’re talking about Ryzen
performance under stock settings – not
overclocked. Even so, if the tool were off
by 20°C in the upward direction, it would
definitely appear to be hot. The fix is likely
to come once the utilities are updated to
recognise the offset of the CPU.
PercePtion: Ryzen is terrible
when it comes to gaming
reality: Not true
If there’s just one fact from this entire feature
that you should remember, it’s this one:
Ryzen is not terrible for gaming. Yes, even
if your friend heard it from a friend who
was watching a friend’s Twitch stream, we
repeat: it is not terrible for gaming.
AMD’s gaming performance can at
times be perplexing. In multi-threaded and
single-threaded applications, it’s generally
outstanding. In tested games, however, Ryzen
tends to takes third place behind Intel’s Kaby
Lake and Broadwell-E CPUs. This is akin to
saying an Olympic 100m runner is ‘slow’ for
getting a bronze medal. Of course, its gaming
performance at higher resolutions and highquality
visual settings is mostly imperceptible,
because that usually turns into a GPU load,
rather than a CPU load. In sum, Ryzen is a
fine gaming CPU and not terrible at all.
PercePtion: AMD is as good as
Intel in gaming today
reality: Partially true
We’ve said that Ryzen isn’t terrible for
gaming, but it’s also not the best. The vast
majority of our own tests, along with those
conducted by other reviewers, show that
when using today’s games and today’s
version of Windows, Ryzen takes a back
seat to Intel’s CPUs.
This can be seen at the most popular
resolution of 1080p and lower, and even at
higher-quality settings in some games. The
processor will also likely falter with monitors
that push high refresh rates, such as 120- or
144Hz. As much as some fans may not want
to accept it, the chip isn’t as good as Core i7
in many gaming scenarios.
Ryzen will be as good as Intel, however,
when you run that game at 4K Ultra HD
resolution. At higher resolutions – which is
where you should be playing with a beefy
GPU such as a GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti –
the graphics card becomes the bottleneck,
and you’ll notice little or no difference
between a Ryzen or Core i7.
Ryzen has proved itself equal to or better
to Intel Core i7 in some games. However,
reasonable observers would agree that
Intel has the lead given today’s conditions.
Tomorrow there may be optimisations, but
tomorrow is not today, and the frame rate
today is what gamers care about.
Despite what you may
have heard, Ryzen is not
terrible for gaming at all
78 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/features July 2017