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According to AMD CEO Lisa Su at https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def5iab/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Am

by mrb 10y ago

According to AMD CEO Lisa Su at https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def5iab/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea... : "there are some games that are using code optimized for our competitor... we are confident that we can work through these issues with the game developers who are actively engaging with our engineering teams." Also, another AMD employee chimed in: "But what's also clear is that there's a distribution of games that run well, and a distribution of games that run poorly. Call it a "bell curve" if you will. It's unfortunate that the outliers are some notable titles, but many of these game devs (e.g. Oxide, Sega, Bethesda) have already said there's significant improvement that can be gleaned. We have proven the Zen performance and IPC. Many reviewers today proved that, at 1080p in games. There is no architectural reason why the remaining titles should be performing as they are." Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def7wsk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea... Unfortunately you can bet Intel is going to put all the spin they can into "AMD underperforms for gaming", while the software game developers are going to slowly optimize for Zen, up to the point where this perf discrepancy will be fully fixed but people will still have the mindset that "AMD unperforms for gaming"... sigh

ufo 10y ago
In what ways can games be optimized for Intel? What is the sort of change that the game developers would need to make to increase performance on AMD?
- Orangeair 10y ago
  - throwawayish 10y ago
    Exactly the opposite is correct. ICC generated code whose runtime dispatch looked at "Are we running on Intel? Select fast path. Not running Intel? Select generic i386 path." http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49
- mrb 10y ago
  Intel provides a lot of tools and SDKs for game developers. I presume some/many are specifically optimized and highly-tuned for running best on Intel processors: https://software.intel.com/en-us/gamedev/ https://software.intel.com/en-us/gamedev/ But also things like physics engines (eg. Havok, which was acquired by Intel and heavily optimized for Intel processors), etc. And of course Intel's C Compiler is known to cripple AMD: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 And some/many games are compiled with ICC...
clarry 10y ago
> while the software game developers are going to slowly optimize for Zen Honestly I'm not very optimistic about that happening. Maybe some will. But the mentality these days seems to be that there's one winner and fuck all the rest -- we're busy and we don't have time to optimize for losers. Like with web developers seeming to almost exclusively work with Chrome except where they're told to support IE (or Safari?). Firefox just isn't popular. Still, there's a chance the multi-core revolution will eventually happen. Vulkan could help us get there, although weren't DX12 was supposed to provide similar improvements in multi-threaded access to the GPU?

by mrb 10y ago

ufo 10y ago

In what ways can games be optimized for Intel? What is the sort of change that the game developers would need to make to increase performance on AMD?

Orangeair 10y ago
- throwawayish 10y ago
  Exactly the opposite is correct. ICC generated code whose runtime dispatch looked at "Are we running on Intel? Select fast path. Not running Intel? Select generic i386 path." http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49
mrb 10y ago
Intel provides a lot of tools and SDKs for game developers. I presume some/many are specifically optimized and highly-tuned for running best on Intel processors: https://software.intel.com/en-us/gamedev/ https://software.intel.com/en-us/gamedev/ But also things like physics engines (eg. Havok, which was acquired by Intel and heavily optimized for Intel processors), etc. And of course Intel's C Compiler is known to cripple AMD: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 And some/many games are compiled with ICC...

clarry 10y ago

> while the software game developers are going to slowly optimize for Zen Honestly I'm not very optimistic about that happening. Maybe some will. But the mentality these days seems to be that there's one winner and fuck all the rest -- we're busy and we don't have time to optimize for losers. Like with web developers seeming to almost exclusively work with Chrome except where they're told to support IE (or Safari?). Firefox just isn't popular. Still, there's a chance the multi-core revolution will eventually happen. Vulkan could help us get there, although weren't DX12 was supposed to provide similar improvements in multi-threaded access to the GPU?