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Comment by Orangeair | Hacker News Reader

As a lot of other people online are pointing out, this is pretty much the exact same thing people said when Bulldozer came out, but it never materialized. AMD has always won in terms of core count, and people have been saying for years that games capable of taking advantage of 8+ threads/cores are right around the corner, but it never really happened. We shouldn't be basing purchase decisions today on what might theoretically happen at some point in the future.

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It's much more true today to be fair, and with DX12/Vulkan it should become much more common over the next few years.

Ryzen is much better positioned anyway because it has almost comparable IPC (Broadwell levels), that means even when you get a dual core/single core optimised game you'll get good performance rather than the horrible situation with older AMD CPUs.

They are here now. Almost no modern AAA game recommends less than 4 cores. Many won't start with less than 4 threads. And they do scale to 8 cores. This is because of the consoles, which both have 6-7 cores.

According to the Steam hardware survey, only about half of PC gamers have four cores, with the other half having two cores. Granted, many of those two-core systems will be four-thread systems, but I don't think its fair to say that the market is dominated by 4+ core users today.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

All the benchmarks I just glanced over show a different story. Yes, big games claim to want 4 cores because that's what big intel has offered for big gamers. Sure they run on 8-core chips and may get a speed boost for that, or not. But it is quite small overall, with the Intel 4-core parts mostly performing better than Ryzen while being cheaper or similarly priced as Ryzen.

What some people here are anticipating is the situation where games really do scale well to 8 cores, at which point we'd likely see the Ryzen compete against Intel's stupidly expensive 8-core parts and roughly match them in performance while solidly beating them in price/performance ratio. Just like in the encoding benchmarks that actually do run well with multiple cores. These games aren't here now. We aren't there now. But it might be the future.

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