One thing that AMD can be proud of is that reviewers? consensus on Zen has so far been a clearly positive one. The Ryzen 7 chips deliver a unique performance and value proposition previously unseen in the market. At $329-$499 Ryzen successfully delivers a level of performance for content creation and a wide array of productivity workloads that was previously only attainable at twice the cost from the competition. In gaming scenarios the Ryzen 7 family fell a bit short of Intel?s most recent Kaby Lake and high-end Broadwell-E products. It?s this unexplained discrepancy between Ryzen?s unexceptional showing in games versus its exceptional performance in everything else that has given many people pause. With that being said, unexceptional does not mean bad. While Ryzen?s gaming performance does not excite to the same extent that its strong showing in professional workloads does, it still manages to deliver a drastic improvement over AMD?s previous generation. In real-world gaming scenarios where real-world screen resolutions and game settings are in play the Ryzen 7 family manages to successfully deliver an uninhibited gaming experience and compete with Intel?s best gaming chips to an extent that its predecessors were simply incapable of doing. This is something that we?ve seen across gaming benchmarks from all reviews. At higher resolutions, think 2560?1440 and 4K, Ryzen hasn?t only been able to compete but also often outperform Intel?s fastest processors. There?s clearly still a lot to explore, examine and understand about Ryzen and we?re conducting more testing of our own as we speak. We unfortunately received our review kit a little bit later than most of the other members of the press, so please bear with us. You can check out our initial performance review of Ryzen which we?ve just published where we compare it to AMD?s previous generation FX 8350 here. In the meantime, AMD has stepped in to answer some of our, and I?m sure your, burning questions regarding the discrepancies we?ve seen in gaming performance at 1080p.
Comment