As we swing into the summer months, the steady stream of application updates for the AMD Ryzen™ processor continue to flow in. This month we’re turning our attention to Rise of the Tomb Raider™ and Pixologic ZBrush, which now integrate major performance updates in public builds.

Rise of the Tomb Raider Performance Patch

Rise of the Tomb Raider has risen to both critical acclaim and widespread use in benchmark suites on the back of its excellent gameplay and beautiful graphics. Starting in version 770.1 of the game (now on Steam™), those beautiful graphics are now a whole lot faster for AMD customers!

Below, we’ve plotted the performance for Rise of the Tomb Raider before and after the patch in 1080p resolution with the medium and high presets applied. We chose the medium preset to minimize the influence of the GPU, but even the more GPU-bound “high” preset yields a healthy uplift.



Testing conducted as of 6/6/2017. System configuration: AMD Ryzen™ 7 1800X Processor, 2x8GB DDR4-3200 (14-14-14-36), GeForce GTX 1080 (382.33 driver), Asus Crosshair VI (BIOS 9943), Windows® 10 x64 build 1607, 1920x1080 resolution.

With an impressive performance gain of ~28% across the medium and high presets, we chatted with Rise of the Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics for insight into what was changed. Here’s what they had to say:

“Rise of the Tomb Raider splits rendering tasks to run on different threads,” Crystal Dynamics said. “By tuning the size of those tasks – breaking some up, allowing multicore CPUs to contribute in more cases, and combining some others, to reduce overheads in the scheduler – the game can more efficiently exploit extra threads on the host CPU.”

Another win for the powerful multi-threading capabilities of the Ryzen™ processor!

With that in the bag, Crystal Dynamics also found a way to reduce GPU driver overhead, saying: “An optimization was identified in texture management that improves the combination of AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU. Overhead was reduced by packing texture descriptor uploads into larger chunks.”

If you’re interested in testing for yourself, it’s easy to test pre-patch performance by popping open the betas tab and rolling back to v767.2.

Pixologic ZBrush Update

And for the creators amongst us, the latest version of ZBrush (4R8) offers a substantial performance update related to placing lights in the real-time viewport. Hold on tight, because this one is a doozy.

Testing conducted as of 6/6/2017. System configuration: AMD Ryzen™ 7 1800X Processor, 2x8GB DDR4-2400 (17-17-17-39), GeForce GTX 1080 (382.05 driver), AMD Ryzen™ Reference Motherboard, Windows® 10 x64 build 1607, 1920x1080 resolution.

Yes, my friends, our test results show that it is now a stunning 204,772% faster to throw down a light source in ZBrush version 4R8 with the AMD Ryzen™ processor. This routine operation has shrunk from an agonizing 22.5 seconds to a blistering 11 milliseconds.

Users will also find that basic UI operations, such as the accessing the “Draw” and “Light” menus, are altogether snappier.

Until next time

What are you interested in hearing more about in our next AMD Ryzen Community Update? Let us know on Twitter @AMDRyzen!



Robert Hallock is a technical marketing guy for AMD's CPU division. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.