id Software Praises AMD Ryzen’s Great Bang For The Buck Value
Needless to say, developers are excited about the potential performance gains from Ryzen, and are already optimizing their engines to take advantage any extra processing grunt. The folks over at id Software are definitely keeping a close eye on Ryzen, and are impressed with what they’ve seen so far.
Robert Duffy, Chief Technology Officer for id Software, says that DOOM 1080p performance on Ryzen was phenomenal right out of the box, and that it is currently working to optimize 4K performance. 8K optimizations are in the pipeline at id Software, with Duffy stating, “we expect everything to do really well”.
“For idTech games and games in general, I think there’s going to be additional CPU headroom certainly offered by the Ryzen platform,” said Duffy. “One of the things we noticed with the test systems is, developer iteration times are a lot faster, because your compiles are faster, booting the game is faster, so from a developer perspective that’s really good.”
The one aspect of Ryzen that has truly won over gamers is pricing. A quick trip over to Amazon shows Ryzen 7 1800X ringing in at $469, which is a relative bargain compared to comparable Intel processors like the Core i7-6900K ($1,019) and Core i7-6950K ($1,650). This point is not lost on Duffy.
“Ryzen has a super attractive price point, so we’re going to see a lot more capable CPUs in a lot more people’s hands over time. The additional threads and cores allow us to turn up a lot of things, better frame rate, more AI, more things happening in the game space, more simulations running, you know, and more realistic worlds.”
Duffy also added that a new version of the idTech engine is already in the works and will be fully optimized for Ryzen processors. “The new engine tech that we’re working now is far more parallel than idTech 6 was. We plan to really consume all the CPU that Ryzen can offer,” Duffy added.
But if you think that the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 were impressive, you haven’t seen anything yet. AMD is on track to release 16-core/32-thread Ryzen parts in the coming months that will use the X399 chipset. The processors support quad-channel DDR4 memory and are expected to top out at speeds of 2.8GHz.
