If thats what you're paid to do and you've got 4 year experience plus bags of funding behind you it shouldn't be a problem. The whole industry is based around parallel processing. Games should be no different.
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I second @Dr.Venkman's claim that theoretically game devs can parallelize many things (within certain limits, due to overhead).
It's not necessarily as simple as throwing money and experience at a problem. Games are heavily parallel workloads but the vast majority of that work is done by the graphics processor, because the graphics processor is a parallel processor with hundreds if not thousands of "cores" dedicated to rendering and outputting whatever it is told to. Stuff the CPU does that can be parallelized isn't as easy to come by. The CPU handles loading data into VRAM, passing instructions to the GPU and processing things like physics, NPC actions, event handling, etc, most of which are relatively singular tasks. Theoretically, yes, you can parallelize games further in terms of CPU load, but at least on consoles, devs are made to push games out as fast as they can and make sure they work, not necessarily to optimize them as much as they possibly can.
Well I suppose the first thing you need to consider is how many threads do you need and what stuff can be thrown into what queue. I have no clue about developing a game, but I can't see the "it's too hard boss" excuse washing very well.
Most of the hard work is probably done at the engine level first and then the studio takes care of the details and calls in the graphics driver guys when needed.
I'd want to make use of every system resource possible to get the best from the game and It's not like 8 core CPU's are a new thing and balancing the work load across the cores is always a good idea.
From looking at the reviews of Ryzen it seems a lot of games make use of 8 cores now.
Does it cost less? Yeah I'd say it costs less. Is it a bad ass? I would say no.
Less we not forget here , the only thing amazing about ryzen is the price to performance. Not the overall performance. Eliminating price as a factor , the cpu's performance is similar to other cpu's. A 1600 cinebench score is achievable on 7 year old motherboards.
What they've done to make the performance affordable is commendable. However , as stated by others many times over , they're just not price gouging to get it to that price.
It's amazing what AMD have done with Ryzen when you think about it. AMD have about 5% of the budget that Intel have, maybe? and got a 60% jump in performance. Intel bring out a new chip with maybe 3% extra performance costing 5% more and it usually needs a new chipset.
If the world made sense Ryzen should be possible.
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You do have to look into how long they worked on it. If they started development in 2012 that would kinda be an expected jump in performance. Granted they really did nail the price point which was good to see.
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I hope so, 1800x being compared to a measly i5 is a bit of a let down honestly.
Yeah thats true, but if you told me in 2012 that AMD would have chip to rival anything Intel have (desktop) in four years I would have laughed my ass off.
Kind of begs the question what have Intel been doing. Maybe a day in the Intel plant is really is like the commercial where everyone is partying.
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Well when you have no competition for 5 years thats what happens, pretty simple business and economics. Why innovate when there is nothing to better. I don't agree with Intel's business tactics, but it makes sense.
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Hmm not sure about that. I'd like to think partying is the problem.
Anyone else remember those commercials?
MMX instructions. Thats the problem.
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I remember not too long ago : the saying was that an i5 is all you need for gaming.
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Long time no post here, big launch, definitely a major break-through for AMD but overall have mixed feelings. Lets be brutally honest here, non enthusiast series intel CPUs have aproximately 1/2 the die space taken up by the IGPU, that means that intel could have produced (for the same cost) X600K & X700K SKUs with 8 Cores like the Ryzen 1700+ if there was no IGPU. And next series they might very well do that.
Also there is a big premium for the x700K over the X600K and they are the same chip with HT disabled, I doubt most x600Ks are defective, i think it is just there pricing strategy to segregate CPUs in this manner, as we saw with the OC exploit, the lower SKUs were able to OC almost as well as the x700k and x600ks. So Ryzen prices are nothing special, at the end of the day they are selling a CPU with (assumably) roughly the same amount of die real-estate (in terms of area/nm) as their competitors for similar pricing.
Likewise overall performance was always going to be higher than their similarly priced counterparts, the 83xx series from AMD was mostlhy competitive at multi-threaded tasks, it just didn't have the single core performance and it didn't have the GPU acceleration. So they were starting out with similar overall performance, and because they didn't do the IGPU they had twice the die realestate, so IPC and clockrate and overall die size would have to have been terrible to not match the competition overall.
So what we saw there was expected, and to be honest AMD doesn't need to match INTEL performance to be successful, they just need to come close, have decent efficency and price their products right, even if they make half the margins, with AMDs overheads they would be highly profitable, and there are alot of commercial cases where you don't need the best chip unlike gaming. And to be clear with AMDs low fixed costs, I doubt intel can compete in terms of pricing.
Where the chip was a disappointment IMO was in that gaming, IDK whether this was because it's a new architecture and nothing was optimized for it, and there are day1 kinks that need to be worked out, but in some of the games performance was way worse, in some productivity workloads performance was worse, and that is disappointing considering you have twice the CPU die realestate and substantially more cache...
And maybe some of you more technical people can elaborate on that, but it's looking like for a lot of consumers that the x700Ks from intel are a very good option for most consumers, particularly if you have those high refresh rate monitors. And I am speculating here, but I am guessing that for those productivity apps where Ryzen was a little bit behind, the cheaper 4cores with IGPU that are undoubtably coming are going to offer better performance. I think those 4cores with the bare bones mobo chipsets and the server parts are going to be the big sellers and the big winners here.
$500 vs $240
$330 vs $240? 8c/16t vs 4c/4t?
The 1700 appears to be the unsung champion of the group..
The point is you are getting I5 performance plus . Which is not completely wonderful but still. A balance will not realized for awhile yet. Patience is needed for things to mature.
It may never be the best gamer but it may end up good enough to game/multitask/productivity all at the same. Which is what drives my keen interest.
Another point to consider that Wendell so gently reminded me of the other day, if one of the cpus is not to your liking that you will still be able to upgrade or change cpus to meet your needs on a more specific level. Without a complete platform change. Making an investment into the intel plat seem like complete price gouging :)
Time will tell all. Lets try to avoid the whole impulse buying consumer sheep these corporations would like us to be.
So why spend the extra money if I don't give a shit about twitch streaming or content creation? I'd rather save the money with an i5 and spend the extra cash on SSD or other components.
No one is twisting your arm ? Buy what you think is right for you. Just avoid impulse purchasing. Understand what it is you are buying.
I am not gonna argue about price to performance as new releases almost always suck in that regard.
k
You made drag my soapbox out a little :)