The New Horizon event in December 13 unveiled the highly-anticipated AMD Ryzen processors. The demonstrations included CPU-intensive workloads, such as Handbrake and Blender. 3D rendering tasks with the KeyShot and ZBrush applications were exhibited as well. Of course, the event wouldn't be complete without gaming, so AMD also showcased "Dota 2," "Battlefield 1" and "Star Wars: Battlefront" (Rogue One DLC) demos.
Formerly known as Summit Ridge, AMD Ryzen is intended for the desktop PC first. Last week's report by GamenGuide stated that AMD had trademarked "Ryzen," "ThreadRipper" and some others, and it seems the company settled for the obvious play on words: Rise + Zen.
AMD Ryzen's "Dota 2" Demo
The "Dota 2" demo used two Titan X-equipped systems, one with Intel i7-6900K and the other with AMD Ryzen. AMD had PPD from Evil Geniuses demonstrate playing "Dota 2" while livestreaming his session to Twitch in 1080p. AMD didn't provide any hard performance metrics, although a similar config with the i7-6900K offered almost equal performance during the same tasks. Another Intel platform was also configured with a Core i7-6700k overclocked to 4.5GHz, but it dropped frames, resisting the encoding workload.
"Battlefield 1" On AMD Ryzen
AMD chose to use an Nvidia Titan X instead its own GPUs during "Battlefield 1 in 4K at maximum settings, although the company designed the test platforms to exclude the GPU bottleneck to highlight limitations on the CPU. According to Tom's Hardware, AMD's Smart Prefetch and Neural Net Prediction offered smooth gameplay between the 60FPS to 70FPS range for the AMD Ryzen system. The demo concluded that Intel processors feature the same technology as Ryzen.
AMD Ryzen Demos "Star Wars: Battlefront" & HTC Vive
The AMD Ryzen demo on and "Star Wars: Battlefront" Rogue One DLC involved a Vega GPU and in 4K resolution. The demo appeared lag-free, with AMD's Lisa Su saying that the game was rendering above 60FPS.
HTC Vive on the AMD Ryzen desktop system in VR was somewhat subjective and hardly provided hard performance data. The demo proved stutter-free however, showing promising implications.
Lisa Su stated that the AMD Ryzen is releasing on Q1 2017, prompting the idea that more optimization could be done. Pricing for the next-gen CPU hasn't been revealed yet, although AMD should make announcements in the weeks to come. In the meantime, you can watch the full event below.
