Ryzen You Little Mystery

Since Ryzen’s release on the 3rd of March, reviewers have been testing and retesting the processors, observing both fantastic and confusing results. Its gaming results would often lag behind the 6900K, despite matching or beating it in professional workloads. Many fingers (including my own) were pointed in many directions, ranging from CCX cross talk to Windows Scheduler behavior, but no single reason was identified. Instead, as AMD claimed, there are multiple reasons that change from game to game. As seen with Ashes of the Singularity, some games require a targeted patch to correct performance due to Ryzen being new, compounding with games being built for Intel’s architecture for so many years.

On March the 30th, about 11 days before the release of the Ryzen 5 line of processors, AMD in a community update promised a new BIOS update, sent out to partners and to be released together with Ryzen 5 to the wide public. Amongst the promised features was a 6ns memory latency reduction. From reviews up to this point it could be seen that Ryzen still has ways to go with latency compared to its Intel counterparts, and this 6ns reduction is a good step towards that. In today’s article we brought you some testing of before and after the AGESA 1.0.0.4 BIOS update, to see what effect the lower memory latency is having.

Test Setup

AMD Ryzen Test bed

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Biostar B350 GT5 Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 3000MHz Sandisk Extreme II 240GB Seagate 4TB SSHD Gigabyte GTX 1080 Windforce 3X Corsair AX 1200i Noctua NH-U12S BIOS 210 (Before) / BIOS 314 (After)

Testing was conducted at 1080p with Ultra quality settings, with each test being ran 3 times and averaged out.

Results were recorded using OCAT.

Results

The results of the update are quite clear. While small, every single game gained performance, some more than others. On average the gains were 2.45%, with the top gainers being Ghost Recon Wildlands at 6.07%, Rise of the Tomb Raider at 4.33%, and Hitman 2016 at 3.73%.

A very nice update overall, providing a free performance upgrade for existing users, and making the Ryzen platform a sweeter deal for prospecting ones.