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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

Quite unbelievable how AMD has botched the Zen5 release, especially since there was no need in rushing these CPUs out the door at all. Why couldn't they wait until these improvements were commonly available? Also, at least from initial testing, it seems that these changes improve Zen4 performance almost the same way as Zen5, so at least when it comes to gaming performance, there's currently no reason to expect that Zen5 will be able to justify its increased price tag. I can safely say that buying a 5800X3D was one of the best purchases I ever made, I still see no reason to upgrade...

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It doesn't seem to be even directly related to the Zen 5 launch, as the problem affects Zen 4 equally, and it looks like Windows has been leaving performance on the table for years, while AMD were completely unaware of the fact.

This only came to light as a result of investigation by Wendell from Level1Tech, who noticed the discrepancy between AMD-provided Zen 5 performance numbers with his own, as well as the performance variability between different BIOS settings. Meanwhile, AMD has been running their internal benchmarks using Admin account, and recommended the same in the official reviewers' guide. Not sure if such ignorance makes them look better or worse in this entire mess.

At least the initial reviewers' guide did not mention Admin account at all. And BTW, just to be clear: this does not mean "Account with administrator privileges", which would be normal for testing, but the (normally hidden) "administrator" account which has UAC completely disabled and hence should never be used for any real work. Why would you even test your hardware with such an obscure setup that no actual user will be using? Note that this account is not readily available but needs to be explicitly activated in an admin command prompt with

net user administrator /active:yes

It could be just easier for AMD's automated tests

Choosing to run specific applications with elevated privileges is enough to get the performance gains for those. Still not safe, but much safer than logging in with the Administrator account.

The 5800X3D isn't even 2,5 years old, of course an upgrade isn't worth its money. To put it into perspective: If you considered upgrading from a RTX3070 to a RTX4070, the RTX4070 wouldn't even have been released. (Time span between them was longer than 2.5 years.)

DDR4 to DDR5 is a pretty big jump, though. Up to 20-30% on Intel depending on what you're doing.

Of course it might not be that significant on AMD which (IIRC) struggles with higher frequencies anyway and at least for gaming memory speed doesn't matter as much cause of the extra cache.

Whether an upgrade is worth it depends on your workload and how much you depend on it. All I can say is that if Zen5 would have brought the same improvement over Zen4 as Zen4 did over Zen3, I would definitely have considered upgrading. But it seems it's nowhere near it. So yes, maybe AMD just made the mistake of performing too well in the past, and it probably was just a matter of time until they hit a wall. The problem really is how AMD has marketed Zen5, with numbers that simply couldn't be reproduced by reviewers, so it really leaves a bad taste.

In the exact same boat with the 5800X3D myself. It's starting to feel like a modern i5-2500k, a CPU that will just keep going and going. I built this machine not long after the 7000 series released and no regrets going for the older platform.

It's not unbelievable when you know AMD's drivers have always been hit or miss since the ATI days, with more misses than hits.

Fans call their driver development "fine wine" since they keep getting better over time, while realists call it "not being able to release good drivers from the start, unlike the competition, needing months to reach parity".

Yeah, their HW is good, but that's nothing without good SW and AMD still has loads of room for improvement there.

AMD being absolute crap on the software front is where Nvidia simply dominates and Intel still makes for a reasonable purchase.

I have a laptop with AMD and NPU. AMD still has no good easy to use out of the box examples on how to use that NPU for on-device AI applications. Nvidia has been delivering that for over 10 years now. SW seems like an afterthought at AMD.

If AMD expects their chips to take off for AI, they should be spamming us with ready made apps and code samples that just work and that we can then modify.

Much like AMD/ATI, Intel has had botched 3d graphics drivers since at least GMA 900 (probably earlier but that's as far as I remember). Try the new Intel Arc card and see how it works for you.

Except that AMD was never competing with Intel for graphics. Their competition was always Nvidia who's drivers and SW support was net superior. Intel was happy to just serve the ultra low end market with integrated GPUs for rendering MS Office back when AMD didn't even have integrated GPUs in it's chips.

Also, on this tangent since you brought up Intel, their Linux driver support is net superior to that of AMD. I have laptops with Intel CPUs (8th gen, 6th gen and 3rd gen) and Ryzen (5000 and 7000 series) and on the Intel ones linux is way more "Just Works" than on AMD. Sample zise of one person of course.

I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. My experience with Intel GPUs on Linux is features getting progressively disabled in newer kernel versions due to hardware bugs (FBC, PSR & DC6 C-state on my Goldmont laptop for example).

My favourite bit is how the intel xorg driver supported TearFree for years, then got sunset and everyone was told to migrate to the modesetting driver. Except there is no TearFree in the modesetting driver (just use a compositor!). It eventually landed in xorg master last year [1], but no one is making releases of it any more.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

Just an anecdote, but the Arc A380 on my kids’ Fedora gaming PC has run everything on our Steam library just fine. A mix of older and more recent titles. I’m sure there are games that don’t work well, but it was cheap and it’s been rock solid.

Zen5 was released less than 2 weeks ago, so not a terrible delay.

If you already have Zen3, then yeah, probably not worth it. I like to wait 4-6 years so the upgrade feels more substantial. Every 2 years hasn't been necessary for at least a decade.

It's a terrible delay w.r.t. reviews, because all the reviews were done without these improvements. First impressions are very hard to fix, and Zen5 is already widely regarded as a flop, at least for desktop/gaming usage.

Apparently Zen4 also benefits from this patch - Hardware Unboxed had an excellent video where they did lots of benchmarking.

Just ordered 5700X3D... So I will be going on with that for a while. Maybe I see the 11700X3D or 11800X3D... Not feeling current gent GPUs either mostly due to pricing...

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