DosFreak wrote:
ArsTechnica wrote:It’s actually a really good gaming processor
It's true that Ryzen's gaming performance doesn't match Intel CPUS. If your interest is solely and exclusively gaming performance, then Intel's Kaby Lake i7-7700K is the best chip on the market, and its price is in the same ballpark as the cheapest Ryzen, the 1700. Not even the top-end 1800X can beat the 7700K.
But the 7700K is the fastest all-round gaming processor on the market today. Being "not as fast as the 7700K" doesn't make a processor "bad" for games. It just means it's not quite as fast as literally the fastest gaming processor ever made.
I think they missed the point here.
The 1800X is not a "bad processor" for gaming, it's bad value for money for gaming, since the 7700k is considerably cheaper than the 1800X, as they said only one line before.
Even the 1700 is only marginally cheaper than the 7700k, and the difference in price is not proportional to the difference in performance in gaming.
Somehow I never heard such arguments back when the P4 was not quite as good as the Athlon in games, yet slightly more expensive. But hey, the P4 had HT and did great in SSE2-optimized tasks such as video encoding and 3d rendering.
They could turn the whole article upside-down and argue from the other side:
Currently they argue that you can get extra cores for little extra money, and basically pray that they will get used more in the future.
You could also argue that you could spend less money on getting less cores today, knowing that you won't be able to benefit from advances in multithreading, should they arrive in the near future.
Or in general... instead of arguing that a CPU that's not "the best" in games is not a "bad processor", you could argue that a CPU that's not "the best" in heavily multithreaded scenarios is not a "bad processor".
Either way, it's a gamble and a choice. And you can debate this forever, and not get anywhere, because you don't know what the future will bring.
So either you take the gamble and invest extra now, because you're optimistic about multicore.
Or you take the gamble and save money now, because you're pessimistic about multicore.
Also take your upgrade-cycle into account. If you upgrade your CPU every 3-5 years, you should expect the multicore 'revolution' to happen or not happen in those next 3-5 years as well. Else it's something you should worry about for your next purchase, not your current one.
I do wonder what all the people think who bought the Bulldozer last time round, hoping for those 8-core games and applications to arrive.
They never did, and the Bulldozer never performed beyond 'meh' anywhere. The gamble didn't pay off.