AMD Shows Intel Can’t Keep Up With Ryzen on Games

At the New Horizon livestream this afternoon, AMD went after Intel in a number of live gaming scenarios to show off their new Ryzen processor. Our good friend James Prior kicked off the head to head gaming comparison where two systems were running Battlefield 1 at 4K resolution with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Pascal graphics cards. The Intel system was running an Intel Core i7-6900K 8-core processor at the stock clock speeds (3.7 GHz base) versus the AMD system with an AMD Ryzen processor running 3.4 GHz without boost.

The end result is that they had comparable performance as both systems were averaging 60-70 FPS, but in the really intense scenes the AMD Ryzen powered system actually had better performance. Mr. Prior explained that this was due to the Ryzen’s new and improved branch prediction unit on this DX12 game title.

AMD brought out Peter ‘PPD’ Dager out for an eSports gaming demo that showed how AMD’s upcoming Ryzen processor handles gaming while also streaming that game. They had three systems in this gaming demo where DOTA 2 was running with the latest 7.00 update. PPD was playing on the AMD Ryzen system where he said he wanted to game with the best graphics possible and that he wants a top CPU that will handle the both his gaming and streaming for his fans. The demo had PPD streaming to Twitch at 1080P 3500kBits with no dropped frames on Ryzen.

The Intel Core i7-6900K powered system was able to keep up with the AMD Ryzen processor with the same general settings, but noted that is expected for a system with an $1,100 processor. It looks like AMD is hinting that AMD Ryzen will cost far less than this. The third and final system that AMD had up on stage contained an Intel Core i7-6700k ‘Skylake’ quad-core processor. AMD actually overclocked this Core i7-6700K processor up to 4.5 GHz flat and found that it still was not powerful enough to play DOTA 2 and stream the game online at the same time. Frames were dropping frames even overclocked and that it was not able to keep up with an AMD Ryzen processor running 3.4 GHz.

AMD also had a demo of their upcoming AMD Vega GPU running Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One: Scarif DLC at 4K Ultra HD resolution on what they believe will be the best gaming system for 2017. It should be noted that this demo was done on just a single AMD Vega GPU. Unfortunately, no performance numbers were shared for this game title, but it did look pretty smooth.

Pretty impressive performance from Ryzen and a 95W TDP processor. We can’t wait to see what the final clock speeds are going to be and most of all pricing. AMD has our attention along with all gamers!

You can watch the one hour long event below! You can also read more about Ryzen in our overview of the new features here.