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[Dinky Dino]

Since I live in a country where any electronic costs an arm and a leg, I really hope AMD can deliver with Ryzen. I might finally get a somewhat decent PC. Intel is basically out of the question for me.

I don't know man countries that see high electronic costs tend to have amd stuff pretty high too. But at the very least you'd at least be getting value on the low end over an i3

It really comes down to the motherboard price as well. AMD has done a good job keeping all of this secret we don't know squat still

 

[TheGreyHulk]

The best part is the rumors about intel possibly prepping an answer for ryzen. Lower prices, an i5 with HT enabled... it's crazy what competition does!!! Google for sources on the rumors. Im at work on mobile

If ryzen does perform well and OC well, ill buy it. If not, ill go intel if they drop prices

 

[Trago]

The best part is the rumors about intel possibly prepping an answer for ryzen. Lower prices, an i5 with HT enabled... it's crazy what competition does!!! Google for sources on the rumors. Im at work on mobile

If ryzen does perform well and OC well, ill buy it. If not, ill go intel if they drop prices

The beauty of fierce competition.

 

[TC McQueen]

That's actually what I'm wondering too. If ryzen is cheap will the mobos be as well? This is a big deciding factor. Will the mobos be in sufficient stock as well? You already know what to expect on intel's side and their socket is always there in stock. Though another deciding factor is that intel's mobos are only really cheap on the non ks you can't overclock.

Literally 3/5ths of the AM4 mobos will support overclocking, so there's going to be all sorts of options:

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

The beauty of fierce competition.

There won't be any competition if the uninformed or those that spread nonsense (like Intel 7700K 4-core is a better buy than any 8-core Ryzen chip if similarly priced...because of 6% better IPC...????) take hold of the narrative that Intel = better automatically.

We can then all enjoy another 10 years of Intel monopoly and crippling stagnation.

 

[Trago]

There won't be any competition if the uninformed or those that spread nonsense (like Intel 7700K 4-core is a better buy than any 8-core Ryzen chip if similarly priced...because of 6% better IPC...????) take hold of the narrative that Intel = better automatically.

We can then all enjoy another 10 years of Intel monopoly and crippling stagnation.

Then we're all fucked.

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

Then we're all fucked.

I'm going to try and quell that crap whenever I see it.

But admitably that's dependent on the strong rumours on Ryzen being true.

 

[ethomaz]

I really want to see benchmarks of Ryzen because something feels like it won't perform like AMD is teasing... same for Vega.

 

[rav]

I really want to see benchmarks of Ryzen because something feels like it won't perform like AMD is teasing... same for Vega.

I also would like to see benchmarks. I'm still pretty optimistic about Ryzen, and with this latest tidbit of news, inching closer to planning on getting Ryzen for sure. Not sure about Vega though, what have you been seeing/hearing?

I'm optimistic about Ryzen due to my profound respect for Jim Keller.

 

[RenegadeXV8]

We're obviously getting benchmarks closer to launch. They're just not gonna show up a month before launch because why would AMD give Intel a month head start on price reductions?

That said, if ShopBLT's distributer prices are accurate and if Ryzen is close to Broadwell in IPC, then that 8-core 16-thread 3.7GHz 65W part is gonna be a huge hit at $300-350.

 

[Insane Metal]

I don't know man countries that see high electronic costs tend to have amd stuff pretty high too. But at the very least you'd at least be getting value on the low end over an i3

It really comes down to the motherboard price as well. AMD has done a good job keeping all of this secret we don't know squat still

Yes, even higher end AMD costs like half the price of a decent i5 (I'm in brazil). And motherboard prices follow the same rule.

For example: an i5 4460 costs ~R$ 1,000 here. Please consider that the minimum wage here is ~R$ 800.00.

 

[Irobot82]

Videocardz posted some new info/leak.

Chips and pricing. Probably wishful pricing.

 

[Renekton]

The best part is the rumors about intel possibly prepping an answer for ryzen. Lower prices, an i5 with HT enabled... it's crazy what competition does!!! Google for sources on the rumors. Im at work on mobile

If ryzen does perform well and OC well, ill buy it. If not, ill go intel if they drop prices

The latest rumor is that those CPUs are for HEDT x299 chipsets 😒 aka KabyLake-X

 

[AstroNut325]

So we're less than a month from release and we don't have independent benchmarks? When are review units expected to go out?

 

[ethomaz]

I also would like to see benchmarks. I'm still pretty optimistic about Ryzen, and with this latest tidbit of news, inching closer to planning on getting Ryzen for sure. Not sure about Vega though, what have you been seeing/hearing?

I'm optimistic about Ryzen due to my profound respect for Jim Keller.

Nothing really concrete about both... just that AMD has the story to hype their product ahead what it is before launch and most guys gets over expectations.

I hope the product is better than most expected but I don't know looks like they are delaying these products because they didn't hit the target.

I'm full of speculation too... let's see the benchs first.

 

[sleepnaught]

If the chip is within 10% of Kabylake I'll buy it on principle alone. We need competition in this space more than ever before.

 

[CrashPrime]

someone in the market for a G4560 wise to wait for Ryzen or are they not aiming at the sub $100 range?

 

[TC McQueen]

someone in the market for a G4560 wise to wait for Ryzen or are they not aiming at the sub $100 range?

I'd wait on sheer principle, since these price details completely blow expectations and speculation out of the water. I never expected a possibility of a sub-$400 8c/16t CPU, so I have no idea what they might be doing with the 4c/8t CPUs. For all we know, a bunch of them are sub-$100.

 

[rokkerkory]

Great competition will force cpu innovation which hasn't happened for awhile

 

[Renekton]

someone in the market for a G4560 wise to wait for Ryzen or are they not aiming at the sub $100 range?

I don't think they have anything that matches the G4560.

Having said that, always better to get a quad-core minimum if you can afford it, unless you just need a HTPC or a box for your kid.

 

[jwhit28]

Has it been mentioned whether Ryzen will have the DRM hardware for 4k streaming services?

 

[Renekton]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...pus_for_preorder_prices_may_be_legit/ddia2b8/

"Ultimately, the pattern from BLT that I am familiar with means that the 1800X will be $449.99 - 499.99 MSRP, barring any sort of price inflation if we are under supplied."

(edit out DRM misinformation)

 

[Papacheeks]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...pus_for_preorder_prices_may_be_legit/ddia2b8/

"Ultimately, the pattern from BLT that I am familiar with means that the 1800X will be $449.99 - 499.99 MSRP, barring any sort of price inflation if we are under supplied."

(edit out DRM misinformation)

Those be some amazing prices if true.

 

[Javin98]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...pus_for_preorder_prices_may_be_legit/ddia2b8/

"Ultimately, the pattern from BLT that I am familiar with means that the 1800X will be $449.99 - 499.99 MSRP, barring any sort of price inflation if we are under supplied."

(edit out DRM misinformation)

R7 1700 for $299? 0_0

If that estimation turns out to be true, and the R7 1700 competes with the i7 6700/7700 power-wise for the price of an i5 6600, Intel needs some major price drops. This is assuming that Ryzen actually delivers in the power front, of course.

 

[catmincer]

I'm gonna build a new gaming pc because my current one sucks and the case is ugly. Definitely gonna go AMD again if competitive with Intel. I always go AMD over nvidia but CPU wise at the moment I cannot justify it.

 

[Paragon]

There won't be any competition if the uninformed or those that spread nonsense (like Intel 7700K 4-core is a better buy than any 8-core Ryzen chip if similarly priced...because of 6% better IPC...????) take hold of the narrative that Intel = better automatically.

We can then all enjoy another 10 years of Intel monopoly and crippling stagnation.

IPC is the main thing that matters for most games, not cores.
If we assume that Kaby Lake has 6% higher IPC and runs at 5GHz, while Ryzen runs at 4.0-4.4GHz, that means Kaby Lake is still going to be 20-30% faster for anything which uses ≤4 cores.
But if you're using an application which can take advantage of all 8 cores vs a 4c/4t Kaby Lake CPU, that same Ryzen CPU could be 30-40% faster.
The question is how many games will actually benefit from >4 cores today, and in the future.

4c/4t Intel CPUs are losing by a significant margin to 4c/8t CPUs in some newer games - but Intel's 8c/16t CPUs are also losing to those 4c/8t CPUs due to the difference in IPC and clockspeed.
I'm also somewhat concerned about the Ryzen platform only offering dual-channel memory when the high-end CPUs have 8 cores.
Intel uses quad-channel on HEDT and are moving to six-channel later this year.
Memory bandwidth is becoming a lot more important in newer games too.

I really need to upgrade from my 2500K though, and plan to do so in March - so it will either be a Ryzen or Kaby Lake build depending on how things bench.
Unfortunately with how poor gaming benchmarks for Kaby Lake have been handled by most sites, I'm not convinced that we will see much useful data for Ryzen and I'll just have to find out for myself by buying one.
I'm starting to thing that either build is going to end up being a temporary upgrade before the next HEDT chips from Intel though.
I don't think that quad-core chips (Kaby Lake) are going to be able to handle newer games a few years from now, and I'm not convinced that AMD's platform for Ryzen is going to have the longevity of Intel's platforms. It seems very much built for today, and not as "forward-thinking" in terms of available upgrades.

 

[Renekton]

R7 1700 for $299? 0_0

If that estimation turns out to be true, and the R7 1700 competes with the i7 6700/7700 power-wise for the price of an i5 6600, Intel needs some major price drops. This is assuming that Ryzen actually delivers in the power front, of course.

Ya it is still a big assumption. The previous performance extrapolations put Ryzen's IPC somewhere between Sandy Bridge and Haswell (?), and the clock headroom is another big question mark.

 

[mordecaii83]

Has it been mentioned whether Ryzen will have the DRM hardware for 4k streaming services?

The APU's are coming later, I would assume if they're based on Vega that they should have it.

 

[Papacheeks]

IPC is the main thing that matters for most games, not cores.
If we assume that Kaby Lake has 6% higher IPC and runs at 5GHz, while Ryzen runs at 4.0-4.4GHz, that means Kaby Lake is still going to be 20-30% faster for anything which uses ≤4 cores.
But if you're using an application which can take advantage of all 8 cores vs a 4c/4t Kaby Lake CPU, that same Ryzen CPU could be 30-40% faster.
The question is how many games will actually benefit from >4 cores today, and in the future.

4c/4t Intel CPUs are losing by a significant margin to 4c/8t CPUs in some newer games - but Intel's 8c/16t CPUs are also losing to those 4c/8t CPUs due to the difference in IPC and clockspeed.
I'm also somewhat concerned about the Ryzen platform only offering dual-channel memory when the high-end CPUs have 8 cores.
Intel uses quad-channel on HEDT and are moving to six-channel later this year.
Memory bandwidth is becoming a lot more important in newer games too.

I really need to upgrade from my 2500K though, and plan to do so in March - so it will either be a Ryzen or Kaby Lake build depending on how things bench.
Unfortunately with how poor gaming benchmarks for Kaby Lake have been handled by most sites, I'm not convinced that we will see much useful data for Ryzen and I'll just have to find out for myself by buying one.
I'm starting to thing that either build is going to end up being a temporary upgrade before the next HEDT chips from Intel though.
I don't think that quad-core chips (Kaby Lake) are going to be able to handle newer games a few years from now, and I'm not convinced that AMD's platform for Ryzen is going to have the longevity of Intel's platforms. It seems very much built for today, and not as "forward-thinking" in terms of available upgrades.

Tell that to the total war series, anything with simulations, and thing's like city skylines among many other open world games cpu matters. The difference in frames on witcher 3 benefited a i7 than an i5.

More games built for PC take advantage of more cores/threads now especially RTS, and open world where there's more things needing immediate processing all the time.

 

[thelastword]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...pus_for_preorder_prices_may_be_legit/ddia2b8/

"Ultimately, the pattern from BLT that I am familiar with means that the 1800X will be $449.99 - 499.99 MSRP, barring any sort of price inflation if we are under supplied."

(edit out DRM misinformation)

If that 3.4GHz Zen they used at CES was able to beat and be on par with a $1000.00+ intel CPU, then such pricing is totally bonkers for a 4.0GHZ version of that CPU.......This is insane, so it seems I could easily get a 3.4GHZ version of that CPU in the $300.00 range, where I could easily overclock.......

 

[Renekton]

Slight related, Intel expects to have 7nm production ready in 3-4 years: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-fab-42-7mn-chandler,33619.html

So 7nm in 2021....

 

[Paragon]

Tell that to the total war series, anything with simulations, and thing's like city skylines among many other open world games cpu matters. The difference in frames on witcher 3 benefited a i7 than an i5.

More games built for PC take advantage of more cores/threads now especially RTS, and open world where there's more things needing immediate processing all the time.

Do you have any sources for that?
Most of the games that I've seen which can take advantage of more than four threads still seem to perform best with a hyperthreaded quad-core running at high clockspeeds compared to 6 or 8 core CPUs.

And that assumes the game can take advantage of more than four cores at all.
A few years from now, I hope that games will actually be taking full advantage of 8c/16t CPUs, but I'm not convinced that it's what's best for gaming right now.
I suspect that I will probably buy an 8c/16t Ryzen part regardless, because I use other applications which will be able to take advantage of all those extra cores/threads, but I'm not convinced that it will be a smart buy for a gaming PC outside of a very small number of games.

 

[Trogdor1123]

That R7 1700 8-core Ryzen for 389.99 euros could absolutely clean up if true. DIY builders would snap it up.

No way it will be that low, isn't that like less than half the equivalent Intel?

 

[Reallink]

Slight related, Intel expects to have 7nm production ready in 3-4 years: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-fab-42-7mn-chandler,33619.html

So 7nm in 2021....

This is bigger news for GPU's (and by association consoles), which are said to be skipping 10nm in favor of 7nm. AFAIK Intel has never been beaten on node shrinks, so if they're that far out, it doesn't bode well for TSMC and GloFlo

 

[Papacheeks]

Do you have any sources for that?
Most of the games that I've seen which can take advantage of more than four threads still seem to perform best with a hyperthreaded quad-core running at high clockspeeds compared to 6 or 8 core CPUs.

And that assumes the game can take advantage of more than four cores at all.
A few years from now, I hope that games will actually be taking full advantage of 8c/16t CPUs, but I'm not convinced that it's what's best for gaming right now.
I suspect that I will probably buy an 8c/16t Ryzen part regardless, because I use other applications which will be able to take advantage of all those extra cores/threads, but I'm not convinced that it will be a smart buy for a gaming PC outside of a very small number of games.

Take out the gtx 1080 and the titan from those tests, also go look at digital foundry doing benches of witcher 3 with i7 standard, OC, and i5 standard oc. The difference is there, especially in GTA V as well.

Those are very obscured because they are using 2 of the most powerful gpu's on the market and one of the tests is on a game like gears 4 that is not cpu bound at all.

I mean the difference isn't huge when using high end gpu's, but it is there when you have mid range graphics cards.

And not everyone that builds pc's for gaming has a 1080 or a titan. I don't I game wit a rx 480 and I run a much older sandy bridge i5 2500k.

But with larger games with more going on like physics on top of heavy scripts running in the background your going to need more threads and more cores. When crackdown 3 comes out bench marks for that I would bet money on will be cpu bound unless they dont write it with the option to allow your cpu to do the extra calculations and leave it up to their "cloud" rendering.

 

[spwolf]

The best part is the rumors about intel possibly prepping an answer for ryzen. Lower prices, an i5 with HT enabled... it's crazy what competition does!!! Google for sources on the rumors. Im at work on mobile

If ryzen does perform well and OC well, ill buy it. If not, ill go intel if they drop prices

i5 was already supposed to be HT... Intel is just a horrible monopolists. Too bad that AMD had crappy cpu's for a long time. My OC'd FX8320 is noticably slower at general computing than my 15w laptop cpu.

So Ryzen has to be up there close to Intel cpu's on single thread performance as well.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

They had to sell their foundry to stay afloat after Intel screwed them over. Sure, they got a settlement out of it, but the damage was done.

Intel didn't force them to overpay to acquire ATI, which caused them to take on a ton of debt just as their Athlon/Athlon 64 glory years were winding down, and then they dramatically failed with the design of Bulldozer.

AMD dug their own graves. Intel had nothing to do with it.

 

[Paragon]

AMD dug their own graves. Intel had nothing to do with it.

Don't forget that Intel was paying companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo to exclusively use their hardware, and they built functions into their compiler to specifically target AMD and VIA CPUs to cripple their performance.
The amount that Intel was fined for these things and more pales in comparison to the damage they caused to AMD.

Take out the gtx 1080 and the titan from those tests, also go look at digital foundry doing benches of witcher 3 with i7 standard, OC, and i5 standard oc. The difference is there, especially in GTA V as well.

Digital Foundry generally only include quad-core CPUs in their testing.
I'm not denying that hyperthreaded quad-cores (i7 with 4c/8t) outperform regular quad-cores. (i5 with 4c/4t)
What I'm saying is that there are very few games where having 8c/8t or 8c/16t will outperform a hyperthreaded quad-core (4c/8t) because you generally have to sacrifice clockspeed and/or IPC for those extra cores.

The Skylake-X HEDT processors later this year will be the first exception to that rule, since Kaby Lake did not improve IPC at all - so it should be the same.
However it's unlikely that you will be able to have 8 cores running at 5GHz+ like the quad-core Kaby Lake CPUs.

Those are very obscured because they are using 2 of the most powerful gpu's on the market and one of the tests is on a game like gears 4 that is not cpu bound at all.

I'm not sure that you understand these tests if that's what you think, because Gears of War 4 shows a clear gap between CPUs with 4 threads and CPUs with 8+ threads (70 FPS minimum to 118 FPS minimum) whether those 8+ threads come from hyperthreading or by having more cores.

I mean the difference isn't huge when using high end gpu's, but it is there when you have mid range graphics cards.

That doesn't make any sense. The faster your GPU is, the more you start to become reliant on CPU performance.

But with larger games with more going on like physics on top of heavy scripts running in the background your going to need more threads and more cores. When crackdown 3 comes out bench marks for that I would bet money on will be cpu bound unless they dont write it with the option to allow your cpu to do the extra calculations and leave it up to their "cloud" rendering.

Maybe - but also maybe not. Or maybe by the time it's actually makes sense to have an 8 core CPU for gaming there will be much faster ones available to buy.
I'm not saying that Ryzen is going to be a bad CPU for gaming, but I think it's unlikely to be a top performer in most currently existing games when compared to something like a 7700K running at 5GHz.
Perhaps in a few years a Ryzen CPU would overtake the 7700K if more games can actually start making full use of an 8c/16t CPU, but that's unlikely to be the case for most games right now.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Don't forget that Intel was paying companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo to exclusively use their hardware, and they built functions into their compiler to specifically target AMD and VIA CPUs to cripple their performance.
The amount that Intel was fined for these things and more pales in comparison to the damage they caused to AMD.

This has literally nothing to do with my point, which was that AMD's disastrous acquisition of ATI is what actually killed them, not anything that Intel ultimately did.

Knowing Intel, they'll probably just strong-arm OEMs to keep their stranglehold on the market like they did last time AMD had good CPUs.

Intel doesn't have to do anything, they have an order of magnitude more production capacity than AMD. No one seems to remember that AMD never had the production capacity to supply more than half the market running the fabs they owned at the time 24/7. AMD's market share peak was more or less constrained by how much they could produce. Intel didn't have to do shit to hold the market besides out-produce AMD.

 

[Nostremitus]

This has literally nothing to do with my point, which was that AMD's disastrous acquisition of ATI is what actually killed them, not anything that Intel ultimately did.

Yes, losing possibly tens of billions to Intel's illegal practices had nothing to do with them losing money and being unable to properly finance and in turn monetize an acquisition.... right...

 

[Lonely1]

I don't get most of the comments in this thread. If the specs and prices are true, Ryzen would murder Broadwell-E and Haswell-E, yet you guys keep talking about the i7-7700k and i7-6700k CPUs as its competition.

I know this forum is gaming centered, but Intel's flagship isn't the 7700k... I am getting a wrong impression?

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Yes, losing possibly tens of billions to Intel's illegal practices had nothing to do with them losing money and being unable to properly finance and in turn monetize an acquisition.... right...

They were extremely profitable at the time of the acquisition. This isn't even an excuse. They didn't start making huge losses until after the acquisition which resulted in multiple billion-dollar write-downs and the subsequent failure of Bulldozer which was designed when AMD was making money hand over fist.

I don't get most of the comments in this thread. If the specs and prices are true, Ryzen would murder Broadwell-E and Haswell-E, yet you guys keep talking about the i7-700k and i7-6700k CPUs as its competition.

I know this forum is gaming centered, but Intel's flagship isn't the 7700k... I am getting a wrong impression?

Performance is extremely complicated. While games are still often heavily driven by single-thread IPC, most games contain at least some degree of multi-threaded code due to code optimization forced upon them by their console brethren with awfully shitty Jaguar CPUs. So some games might benefit greatly from Ryzen having 8 cores going up against 6 core Intel CPUs in the same price range, like Civilization VI and Battlefield 1. Most games will probably still favor the higher single-thread IPC of Skylake and Kaby Lake despite those having only 4 cores.

 

[Lonely1]

Performance is extremely complicated. While games are still often heavily driven by single-thread IPC, most games contain at least some degree of multi-threaded code due to code optimization forced upon them by their console brethren with awfully shitty Jaguar CPUs. So some games might benefit greatly from Ryzen having 8 cores going up against 6 core Intel CPUs in the same price range, like Civilization VI and Battlefield 1. Most games will probably still favor the higher single-thread IPC of Skylake and Kaby Lake despite those having only 4 cores.

Eh, there's more to performance than games. When gaming, my rig is limited by my GPU, not CPU. I get the CPU discussions when people talk about i3 vs i5 vs i7, but, IMHO, i7 vs i7-E+ is a moot point atm, you will be GPU limited on anything from Haswell on.

But my PC is also my main work tool. I use it for running highly parallelized numerical experiments and instances of virtual machines. If the leaks are true, then the whole Intel 'E' line becomes of extremely bad value, and I believe that is a much bigger story than whenever GTA5 wins or loses 5 frames when using Sli-Pascal Titans.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Eh, there's more to performance than games. When gaming, my rig is limited by my GPU, not CPU. I get the CPU discussions when people talk about i3 vs i5 vs i7, but, IMHO, i7 vs i7-E+ is a moot point atm, you will be GPU limited on anything from Haswell on.

But my PC is also my main work tool. I use it for running highly parallelized numerical experiments and instances of virtual machines. If the leaks are true, then the whole Intel 'E' line becomes of extremely bad value, and I believe that is a much bigger story than whenever GTA5 wins or loses 5 frames when using Sli-Pascal Titans.

On GAF, and especially on the Gaming side, most people are talking about performance in games.

But I'm someone who passed up on 6700K to get 5820K so I could make my videos encode faster, so yes, I hear what you are saying and I agree.

 

[Renekton]

This is bigger news for GPU's (and by association consoles), which are said to be skipping 10nm in favor of 7nm. AFAIK Intel has never been beaten on node shrinks, so if they're that far out, it doesn't bode well for TSMC and GloFlo

I'm wondering if Samsung/TSMC can be earlier to market with their "faux" 7nm which is not as small as Intel's.

 

[LelouchZero]

Do you have any sources for that?
Most of the games that I've seen which can take advantage of more than four threads still seem to perform best with a hyperthreaded quad-core running at high clockspeeds compared to 6 or 8 core CPUs.

And that assumes the game can take advantage of more than four cores at all.
A few years from now, I hope that games will actually be taking full advantage of 8c/16t CPUs, but I'm not convinced that it's what's best for gaming right now.
I suspect that I will probably buy an 8c/16t Ryzen part regardless, because I use other applications which will be able to take advantage of all those extra cores/threads, but I'm not convinced that it will be a smart buy for a gaming PC outside of a very small number of games.

The number of games that take advantage of 4+ threads is steadily increasing, however 6 and 8 cores Intel processors haven't distanced themselves much as of yet in games, unlike how the 4 core i7s have distanced themselves fairly significantly from 4 core i5s in a couple of games.

However the additional cores often help when pushing over 60 fps and targeting 100+ fps. Most Frostbite games from 2014+ scale to 4+ threads so titles which do would be games such as Star Wars Battlefront, Need For Speed (2015/2016) and Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare 1 and 2.

Single-threaded performance is still very important for games, so processors with 4+ threads and high single-thread performance/clocks is key depending on the parallelism of the game.

Here's some examples:

Assassin's Creed Syndicate

They appear to be running their 5820K at 2.5GHz, however the 6C/12T configurtaion provides a 15% boost to the average frame-rate.

Source (PC Games Hardware)

Battlefield 1

The 8C/16T configuration in this game has a roughly 15% higher average and a roughly 14% higher minimum frame-rate.

Source - PC Games Hardware

With higher clockspeeds these 6+ core processors would be able to perform even better in CPU bound scenarios.

In the Gears of War 4 benchmark you posted, the i7 6700K 4GHz has a 3% higher average and a roughly 10% higher minimum frame-rate than the 5960X that is clocked at 3GHz, the Skylake CPU also has an IPC advantage of around 10% thanks to it's architecture.

The 5960X at 4GHz would likely see gains of around 20-33% providing it's CPU bound as even with it's lower clock-speed it and slower cores it's not that far off from the i7 6700K which has a single-threaded performance advantage of around 25-40%

Here's another Total War: Warhammer benchmark, which shows how it can scale with more cores:

Source - Guru3D

 

[Paragon]

Thanks for the examples, but those are all theoretical tests to see if a game engine scales with cores or not by using a single CPU at a fixed clockspeed and disabling cores/HT - and it certainly doesn't look like linear scaling in most of them.

It does not show real-world comparisons between something like a 6900K running at 4GHz and a 7700K at 5GHz though.
In 99% of games, the 7700K will perform better because clockspeed and IPC is what matters, not overall multithreaded performance where the 6900K could be about 50% faster.

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

IPC is the main thing that matters for most games, not cores.
If we assume that Kaby Lake has 6% higher IPC and runs at 5GHz, while Ryzen runs at 4.0-4.4GHz, that means Kaby Lake is still going to be 20-30% faster for anything which uses ≤4 cores.
But if you're using an application which can take advantage of all 8 cores vs a 4c/4t Kaby Lake CPU, that same Ryzen CPU could be 30-40% faster.
The question is how many games will actually benefit from >4 cores today, and in the future.

4c/4t Intel CPUs are losing by a significant margin to 4c/8t CPUs in some newer games - but Intel's 8c/16t CPUs are also losing to those 4c/8t CPUs due to the difference in IPC and clockspeed.
I'm also somewhat concerned about the Ryzen platform only offering dual-channel memory when the high-end CPUs have 8 cores.
Intel uses quad-channel on HEDT and are moving to six-channel later this year.
Memory bandwidth is becoming a lot more important in newer games too.

I really need to upgrade from my 2500K though, and plan to do so in March - so it will either be a Ryzen or Kaby Lake build depending on how things bench.
Unfortunately with how poor gaming benchmarks for Kaby Lake have been handled by most sites, I'm not convinced that we will see much useful data for Ryzen and I'll just have to find out for myself by buying one.
I'm starting to thing that either build is going to end up being a temporary upgrade before the next HEDT chips from Intel though.
I don't think that quad-core chips (Kaby Lake) are going to be able to handle newer games a few years from now, and I'm not convinced that AMD's platform for Ryzen is going to have the longevity of Intel's platforms. It seems very much built for today, and not as "forward-thinking" in terms of available upgrades.

Yes but what I said in my post is there are strong rumours Ryzen also overclocks to 5Ghz. So what you end up with is just 5-8% better ipc on Intel or 4 more cores for Ryzen, at which point there is no question Ryzen is the better buy by some distance if both similarly priced.

 

[Lagspike_exe]

R7 1700 coming for 7700K's head. Even with lower IPC, I think that's by far the best buy in that segment considering that extra 4 cores will definitely get more use in the next 3 years or so.

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

No way it will be that low, isn't that like less than half the equivalent Intel?

The price rumour is that, although this 8-core Ryzen might have 8 threads instead of 16.

I don't get most of the comments in this thread. If the specs and prices are true, Ryzen would murder Broadwell-E and Haswell-E, yet you guys keep talking about the i7-7700k and i7-6700k CPUs as its competition.

I know this forum is gaming centered, but Intel's flagship isn't the 7700k... I am getting a wrong impression?

Because at the price rumours of the 8-core R7 1700 at $389.99, it's direct competition in price on Intel side is the 4-core 7700K at around $400. But yeah, the flagship Ryzen R7 1800X is going up against Intel's ridiculously expensive HEDTs.