Tweaks & Support, Power Plan, and Game Benchmarks

Eric_010: Is AMD working with Battlefield 1 developer DICE to improve performance on Ryzen CPUs?

DON WOLIGROSKI: We're engaging with every major developer we can to make sure the Ryzen gaming experience only gets better. For now I'd play with the Battlefield 1 DirectX setting and detail to optimize the game, offhand I don't recall hearing about these issues on BF1 and Ryzen so this might be a problem specific to your system. That said, there's a lot of data being tracked and I apologize if it's a known issue that I can't recall at the moment.

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fourseven: I live in Indonesia. Do you know when AMD plans to launch the Ryzen 5 in South East Asia, specifically in Indonesia?

DON WOLIGROSKI: Official on-shelf launch day is April 11th worldwide. I'm not sure if your specific country has any challenges that would prevent that, but that's the day we expect Ryzen 5 to be available on shelf.

cstephenson: When do you expect the Ryzen chips to be competitive with Intel in terms of gaming? The potential is certainly there!

DON WOLIGROSKI: I'd argue that Ryzen is already competitive. There's been a lot of reviewers talking about outliers where we don't do as well, and bringing a lot of focus to them. And those outliers are where we've focused our first-round of developer engagements. Games like Ashes of the Singularity, Total War: Warhammer, and DOTA2 already have improvements.

With the new faster memory support, we average game performance delta between Ryzen and Kaby Lake is a lot closer than you'd think over a wide swath of games at 1080p. And Ryzen can hit over 60 FPS in pretty much every game I've seen at 1080p, and usually over 80 FPS and 120 FPS. It's never slow, it's just not the fastest. At 1440p, 4K, and in VR, the delta becomes insignificant between Ryzen and Kaby.

Based on that, I think it's fair to say we're already quite competitive, we're just not just not the fastest at 1080p gaming. Saying Ryzen isn't a competitive gaming CPU because Kaby is a bit faster is like saying the Ferrari 488 isn't a competitive sports car because the Bugatti Veyron is faster. It's a gross oversimplification.

Ditt44: Having just read that AMD has a new power plan available, is this something that we will see integrated with Ryzen after "Date X" or will users have to manually download and update?

DON WOLIGROSKI: For now it’s a manual download. Our long-term goal is to get it automatically updated in Windows, but I don't have a target date on that yet, sorry.

Tech_TTT: Are we expecting an AMD APU with onboard HBM2 Memory as shared memory for both System and GPU and no DIMMs slots any time sooner? What are your plans for very low voltage CPU? The Ryzen managed a good 65W TDP for 8 cores. Can we expect a 15W 4 core Ryzen APU to compete with a low voltage Intel CPU?

DON WOLIGROSKI: We're definitely considering different HBM implementations, but we haven't announced anything I can talk to. In a lot of ways the Zen architecture gets more impressive as you provide less power. I can't comment on unannounced laptop parts, but there are great things coming!

Tech_TTT: Why did you choose to go dual channel memory and not quad or eight channels for the Ryzen? Why doesn’t AMD manufacture their own motherboards?

DON WOLIGROSKI: We decided to focus on what’s best for the market. Our goal is to have a platform that competes with low-end Intel boards all the way up to high-end Intel Extreme. After analyzing the benefits, the real-world advantage of quad-channel RAM doesn't outweigh the extra costs or trade-offs. The vast majority of users will never see the difference. Heck, the dual-channel 1800X can still beat the tar out of the quad-channel 6900K in many benchmarks. I think it was a good compromise for the vast majority of users. From an enthusiast perspective, it's always nice to have more, though, so I get it.

AMD does not manufacture their own motherboards because, frankly, our partners do a better job and offer more differentiation and flavor than AMD would want to. We're happy to concentrate on the processors and leave the boards to the specialists.

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