Intel still beats Ryzen at games

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It's true that Ryzen's gaming performance doesn't match Intel CPUS. If your interest is solely and exclusively gaming performance, then Intel's Kaby Lake i7-7700K is the best chip on the market, and its price is in the same ballpark as the cheapest Ryzen, the 1700. Not even the top-end 1800X can beat the 7700K.

But the 7700K is the fastest all-round gaming processor on the market today. Being "not as fast as the 7700K" doesn't make a processor "bad" for games. It just means it's not quite as fast as literally the fastest gaming processor ever made.

For the most part, the differences between the processors are academic. In almost every case, the difference between the Ryzen and the Kaby Lake is that one has a slightly lower, but still very playable, framerate than the other. If benchmarks were showing that the Intel chips are consistently above, say, 60 frames per second while the AMD chips were consistently below, then, certainly, a good argument could be made that the Intel processor will provide a smooth gaming experience where the AMD one won't.

But generally, that's not the case. Even where the gap is quite substantial, such as Rise of the Tomb Raider, where we saw 135fps on both the Kaby Lake i7-7700K and the (eight-core/16-thread) Broadwell-E i7-6900K, the 1800X managed 110fps. That speed is still comfortably playable. Tech Report saw even more extreme differences in Doom in OpenGL mode; 170fps for the 7700K, just 123fps for the 1800X; Tech Report doesn't include the 6900K, but the 10-core/20-thread 6950K achieves 156fps. The 1800X certainly gives up some fps, but it remains perfectly playable. Switch to the newer Vulkan API instead of OpenGL and the difference evaporates away, with both the 7700K and the 1800X averaging 165fps. The 6950X, for what it's worth, is slightly behind at 161fps.

This is why we concluded that the 1800X was a very solid alternative to the Broadwell-E 6900X—it offers very comparable performance at less than half the price. Even for gaming, it remains a worthy contender: Ryzen is "good enough that you may well be willing to take the performance hit in some programs so that you can enjoy the big wins in others."

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