But what about a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution? Duffy said the team is currently testing 4K with the Id Tech 6 engine running on Ryzen 7 now and plans to start 8K testing in the near future (7,680 x 4,320). However, he can safely say that any PC game, whether it is based on Id Tech 6 or not, will benefit from the additional CPU headroom provided by the Ryzen processor platform.
As a refresher, AMD now sells two groups of Ryzen-branded processors based on its built-from-scratch “Zen” processor design: Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5. The Ryzen 7 group consists of three chips ranging in base clock speeds between 3.0GHz and 3.6GHz. They target the enthusiast market whereas the Ryzen 5 processors focus on the mainstream high-quality PC gaming market.
“If you take into account how many people are streaming their gameplay these days, that pushing a lot of bandwidth out the pipe, that’s doing live video encoding,” Duffy said. “And you think about the additional cores and capabilities Ryzen has, the games are still going to run really fast even if they’re doing all of this other stuff on their PC at the same time.”
Yep, there are a lot of cores in most of the new Ryzen processors, and here they are:
| Ryzen 7 1800 |
Ryzen 7 1700X |
Ryzen 7 1700 |
Ryzen 5 1600X |
Ryzen 5 1600 |
Ryzen 5 1500X |
Ryzen 5 1400 |
|
| Cores: | 8 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 4 |
| Threads: | 16 | 16 | 16 | 12 | 12 | 8 | 8 |
| Base: | 3.6GHz | 3.4GHz | 3.0GHz | 3.6GHz | 3.2GHz | 3.5GHz | 3.2GHz |
| Max: | 4.0GHz | 3.8GHz | 3.7GHz | 4.0GHz | 3.6GHz | 3.7GHz | 3.4GHz |
| Price: | $460 | $370 | $318 | $249 | $219 | $189 | $167 |
Duffy says that Ryzen has a “super-attractive” price point, and he’s spot-on with the Ryzen 5 chips. Get into six-core territory, and customers have a starting price of $219, which is not shabby at all. Even still, the eight-core 1700 chip has a very attractive price point, which only gets higher as AMD cranks up the base and turbo speeds of each core. As demonstrated by AMD over the last six months, an Intel processor that is comparable to the Ryzen 7 1800 is double the price.
And that was/is a big selling point for AMD: Powerful performance at half the cost. According to Duffy, those additional cores and threads will enable developers to cram in more frames per second, more artificial intelligence, more actions in the game space, more simulations, and so on. Ryzen, he says, will bring better gaming immersion to more people.
Of course, the team is currently working on Id Tech 7, which will be optimized for Ryzen processors right out of the box. The new engine is “far more parallel” than Id Tech 6, he says, and will fully consume all the processing power Ryzen can dish out. Quake Champions will take advantage of Ryzen 7 and the upcoming Radeon RX Vega cards too.
