Some people may remember that I wrote a rather glowing review of the Intel Core i7 8700K (review linked here). At the time it was the best processor one could buy at the time if you were a gamer. Ryzen version 1 had issues, clock-for-clock AMD was indeed slower than Intel and game benchmarks did indeed show it. Frames per second was lower on Ryzen than Intel… back then.
Fast forward to today and that performance gap isn’t quite as large as it once was. Some of this is in part to changes with Ryzen v1.5 or the Ryzen 2000-series of processors but also due to changes in nVidia GPU drivers that were shown to heavily favor Intel CPUs. Now that performance tweaks to nVidia GPU drivers have seen improvements to the operation of them on AMD along with kernel level improvements in Windows itself AMD Ryzen is no longer seeing the performance gap that it once had.
This in turn is a good thing for consumers, no longer are you beholden to Intel if you want great performance. You now have AMD to look at to get more performance per dollar than with Intel. This is what healthy competition looks like.
Last updated on Friday, March 15th, 2019 at 6:21 PM by trparky.