



AMD got off to a bit of a shaky start when it launched its Ryzen processors with regards to gaming performance . However, this was to be expected given that Ryzen is based on brand new Zen architecture and developers need time to optimize for the platform. Luckily, both AMD — with its microcode updates — and developers have been quick to bolster Ryzen’s gaming performance.

That latest updates bring a huge performance uplift for Rise of the Tomb Raider and Pixologic’s ZBrush. With Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ryzen processors are getting a massive performance boost thanks to the new v770.1 patch. AMD provided performance benchmarks for the game running at 1080p on a Ryzen 7 1800X processor paired with 16GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards running on an ASUS Crosshair VI motherboard.

“We chose the ‘medium’ preset to minimize the influence of the GPU, but even the more GPU-bound ‘high’ preset yields a healthy uplift,” writes AMD Technical Marketing guru Robert Hallock. As you can see, the results speak for themselves:



With the v770.1 patch, which is now available via Steam, gamers can expect to see a roughly 28 percent performance gain across the board in both the medium and high presets. Rise of the Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics clued us in how it was able to achieve this performance bump:

Rise of the Tomb Raider splits rendering tasks to run on different threads. 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.

But the performance updates aren’t just limited to games. ZBrush has also received a performance update its latest 4R8 release. In this base, Light Placement performance has been improved by 204,772 percent according to AMD, falling from 22.5 seconds down to an astonishing 11 milliseconds. Even if you are not a ZBrush user, you can still appreciate that dramatic reduction in the time it takes to place lights using the real-time viewport.



In addition, Pixologic states that more basic operations in ZBrush such as navigating the Draw and Light menus should be “snappier” for users.

ZBrush 4R8 is available to download here, and you can see a demo of the build below:

For tips on how to optimize your AMD Ryzen system, be sure to check out our tweaking guide.