AMD is smoother, and other debunkings of r/amd zingers

No one else has the same experience?

I went from a 4790K, 12GB RAM, 1TB 5400 RPM HD, GT710 (for the host), and GTX980 (for the W10 virtual machine). Ran the whole thing with on Arch Linux with KVM/Looking-Glass,t the performance was okay for 1080p. However, VR performance was abysmal... Felt like a PowerPoint slideshow most of the time.

So, I upgraded to a 3900X, 32GB RAM, PCI-E 4.0 NVME, 5700XT, and ran it all on Windows 10 only. The performance is night and day difference, so much smoother. God damn does Intel and Nvidia suck!
 
No one else has the same experience?

I went from a 4790K, 12GB RAM, 1TB 5400 RPM HD, GT710 (for the host), and GTX980 (for the W10 virtual machine). Ran the whole thing with on Arch Linux with KVM/Looking-Glass,t the performance was okay for 1080p. However, VR performance was abysmal... Felt like a PowerPoint slideshow most of the time.

So, I upgraded to a 3900X, 32GB RAM, PCI-E 4.0 NVME, 5700XT, and ran it all on Windows 10 only. The performance is night and day difference, so much smoother. God damn does Intel and Nvidia suck!

Yes but are daily activites hassle-free (as they should be)?

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No one else has the same experience?

I went from a 4790K, 12GB RAM, 1TB 5400 RPM HD, GT710 (for the host), and GTX980 (for the W10 virtual machine). Ran the whole thing with on Arch Linux with KVM/Looking-Glass,t the performance was okay for 1080p. However, VR performance was abysmal... Felt like a PowerPoint slideshow most of the time.

So, I upgraded to a 3900X, 32GB RAM, PCI-E 4.0 NVME, 5700XT, and ran it all on Windows 10 only. The performance is night and day difference, so much smoother. God damn does Intel and Nvidia suck!
I think to properly state this though you should also be A/B testing it with another Intel machine from the same gen as your 3900X. Say a 9900k?
Or should I just be making a /s remark?

EDIT: Just started watching the GN vid. This is literally addressed in the first minute. I guess it all should just be /s.
 
Yes but are daily activites hassle-free (as they should be)?

View attachment 269568
Honestly, I would have to say yes. Before knowing the power of 24 threads I used to be hunched over in anger. Mostly due to how long it would take for anything to launch. Since my new purchase I have a lot more free time. So, I took up yoga and started pruning my collection of neglected bonsai trees.
 
I think to properly state this though you should also be A/B testing it with another Intel machine from the same gen as your 3900X. Say a 9900k?
Or should I just be making a /s remark?

EDIT: Just started watching the GN vid. This is literally addressed in the first minute. I guess it all should just be /s.
It is, thanks for not flipping out on me.
 
Honestly, I would have to say yes. Before knowing the power of 24 threads I used to be hunched over in anger. Mostly due to how long it would take for anything to launch. Since my new purchase I have a lot more free time. So, I took up yoga and started pruning my collection of neglected bonsai trees.
LMAO
You really need to post more.
 
SSD for Windows, SSD for games, all temp in ramdisk, ~2200 RAM with low timings, custom CPU power plan ( check time interval=1 m.sec). And everything is "smooth" on my clocked FX...
Well on Ryzen system is a bit more smoot but not so much.
Smoothness is complex from all system components but not only CPU.
 
If I had to choose between a 6 core 10600k and the 3700xt with 8 cores then AMD would be my choice every single time. What Tech Jesus purposely and admittedly left out was multitasking or overlapping application + game usage which often happens now. I would have liked to seen frametime and pacing tests with both systems using a modern game + obs x264 streaming to see which was more heavily affected. Fact is more and more gamers are choosing to stream now and so having more cores and threads available is a big deciding factor and why AMD is clearly the better choice and really is “smoother” when you use it outside of just a controlled test.

As a caveat, it’s worth noting I own a 9900k@5ghz but would never buy Intel in today’s market so I’m no AMD cpu fanboy.
 
I've addressed this topic in the past a few times so I'll weigh in here. I have no idea where this "Ryzen is smoother" nonsense came from. If your coming from an old Intel CPU, as the Gamer's Nexus video suggests and going to a 3rd generation Ryzen, you will experience a smoother gaming experience or smoother experiences doing regular tasks. The reason should be obvious. It's a faster CPU with more cores and threads than your old one. You have more modern IO in newer builds and most likely, faster RAM. Naturally, the newer system is likely to be better than the old one. If it wasn't, then why did you upgrade?

AMD systems are definitely not smoother. Back when I reviewed the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, I had it and a Core i9-9900K system right next to it. Both had the same amount of RAM at the same speeds, using NVMe drives, same version of Windows, the same monitors, and the same graphics cards. If anything, AMD would have had a slight advantage using a faster NVMe storage drive which was PCIe 4.0 as I only had one of those for testing. I had these two sitting right next to each other running the same benchmarks.

When I transitioned between the two, the Intel system actually felt slightly more responsive. If you loaded all the cores, then obviously, Ryzen had a performance advantage which the numbers confirmed. However, it never felt as smooth as the Intel system did. Opening a web browser and doing common tasks like accessing drives, folders and the like was always felt just a bit quicker on the Intel system. Trying to use both at the same time with different hands on the mice, seemed to confirm this. Although I'd be the first to admit, that wasn't a scientific testing method. You would really need a slow motion camera to spot the difference beyond the slight feeling that one was a bit snappier than the other.

The difference, was not something I'd ever noticed before between earlier Ryzen and Intel systems. Though this was the first test where I had them side by side that way. The difference was so small that I never noticed it just walking up to one machine or the other. It was only when I performed a task on one, then immediately moved to the other one without any delay in between and performed the same task. The difference is hard to quantify, as its so slight that its hard to spot. It was consistent enough for me to take notice of it, but not enough to make me choose Intel over AMD. If I didn't have these things next to each other, I have no doubt that I'd never have discovered this.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not sure that most people would notice this in the same test setup. I'm very sensitive to things like input lag, refresh rates, and the like. I typically notice slight performance differences even when most people don't. That's not to say that this is unique to me, but when I had people use both systems on my test bench who were not tech savvy enough to know which was which, they didn't notice any differences at all.

Just to add, I've played the games I test in the reviews extensively on both Intel and AMD platforms and despite the numbers almost always saying that the Intel system is faster, I can't tell the difference between a 9900K and a 3950X most of the time.
 
Apparently when people were shouting Intel is just "smoother" before that word didn't trigger youtube experts but if you switch that word to AMD it's "hold on now, wait a minute here"...

Because it was, mostly, true with Intel. Especially when you're talking about the pre-Ryzen days. The whole "AMD is smoother" nonsense is a huge misconception, something that should be nipped in the bud. There is no grand conspiracy here, just GN correcting misinformation that could effect the general consumer.
 
Because it was, mostly, true with Intel. Especially when you're talking about the pre-Ryzen days. The whole "AMD is smoother" nonsense is a huge misconception, something that should be nipped in the bud. There is no grand conspiracy here, just GN correcting misinformation that could effect the general consumer.

Indeed. Even back in the Pentium 4 vs. Athlon 64 days, this was mostly true. Intel systems felt smoother when multi-tasking due to Hyperthreading. It's really not a surprise. If you switched to a dual Opteron rig like I did, then that advantage was lost. It wasn't hard to figure out why.
 
Say what you want but my 3950x is SMOOOOOOOTH compared to the 5ghz 7820x I ran before it. The Windows experience as a whole is more responsive on the same SSD and RAM and peripherals. I know for a fact it isn't faster at everything (workload dependent) but the whole experience is better in almost every way. I haven't felt this good about my desktop experience in a long time.

I'm not sure how many cores Win10 needs to feel this way on an X299 rig but I would have thought that 8/16 would have cut the mustard...
 
Because it was, mostly, true with Intel. Especially when you're talking about the pre-Ryzen days. The whole "AMD is smoother" nonsense is a huge misconception, something that should be nipped in the bud. There is no grand conspiracy here, just GN correcting misinformation that could effect the general consumer.

Any upgrade to newer equipment is going to feel smoother regardless of AMD to Intel or Intel to AMD. Especially upgrading a generation or so newer.That includes equiment of old. There is no misconception needing correction if you use common sense. Tech Jesus is just going for YT hits....
 
Say what you want but my 3950x is SMOOOOOOOTH compared to the 5ghz 7820x I ran before it. The Windows experience as a whole is more responsive on the same SSD and RAM and peripherals. I know for a fact it isn't faster at everything (workload dependent) but the whole experience is better in almost every way. I haven't felt this good about my desktop experience in a long time.

I'm not sure how many cores Win10 needs to feel this way on an X299 rig but I would have thought that 8/16 would have cut the mustard...

Even if you used much of the same hardware, I'm almost certain you re-installed Windows since you had to change the motherboard and CPU out. If you didn't, then you probably should have. But if you did, that alone could be the reason for the increase in smoothness. I don't know what RAM you are using, but Ryzen benefits more from lower latency and higher speed RAM in a lot of instances so that too could contribute to that feeling too. Your SSD, if its an NVMe drive isn't going through the PCH, it's going directly to the CPU. Firmware can come into play as well. There are simply too many variables in an apples to cucumbers comparison like that. Comparing the two equally is difficult. Of course, in most workloads, the Ryzen is going to be faster as well due to having more cores and threads.
 
Even if you used much of the same hardware, I'm almost certain you re-installed Windows since you had to change the motherboard and CPU out. If you didn't, then you probably should have. But if you did, that alone could be the reason for the increase in smoothness. I don't know what RAM you are using, but Ryzen benefits more from lower latency and higher speed RAM in a lot of instances so that too could contribute to that feeling too. Your SSD, if its an NVMe drive isn't going through the PCH, it's going directly to the CPU. Firmware can come into play as well. There are simply too many variables in an apples to cucumbers comparison like that. Comparing the two equally is difficult. Of course, in most workloads, the Ryzen is going to be faster as well due to having more cores and threads.
1. I actually reinstall quite often. I was not migrating an old install but I also wasn't going from an install that was more than 6 months old.
2. Friend with a nearly identical setup, 5ghz 7800x, made the swap to a 3900x and different board but same SSD/RAM as well and migrated his Win10 install and he reports the same exact feel that you will write off.
3. There is no point in trying to dispute the "feel" claims as your argument will always boil down to "well it's new hardware vs old" or "well there are other factors because you can't just drop a ryzen cpu into an x299 board..." Well guess what, they kind of work in concert so how exactly are you going to get a scientifically fair comparison? The whole claim is that the experience is smoother/better and until you can quantify the experience across a broad range of users that made the switch with equivalent systems I don't believe you have any ground to stand on higher than mine.
 
Yeah that's a pretty low use case Dan_D . I think people had similar experience to mine. While using intel every upgrade felt worthwhile gaming wise (2500k to 4790k to 6700k), the system would chug when multi-tasking or just keeping a bunch apps open. Most people won't notice lag, but probably notice when app stalls while processing (or most likely waiting for core/thread to free up). As a user I got use to closing apps, suspending background apps before gaming. Live with the tradeoff because gaming performance was leaps better than anything AMD had at the time and better than previous intel chip. Then going from 4core/8thread or 4/4 to any AMD ryzen 8c/16t, was a notable difference that it impacted how I used my system. I leave everything open, don't worry about closing browser with tons of tabs, don't logout of work profile, etc. If I want to game, I just do it with no worries about apps/background process causing a game fps stutter. Now if intel provided that upgrade experience prior to Ryzen, probably never looked at any Ryzen chips. However, AMD has and now they get first look if I choose to upgrade. Subjective experience matters and Intel got burned maximizing profits with their long run incremental upgrades and AMD coming at the right time with 8 core 1700/1800 Ryzen chips. Slower per core, but man really felt like a big upgrade from normal use POV coming from a 6700k.
 
Any upgrade to newer equipment is going to feel smoother regardless of AMD to Intel or Intel to AMD. Especially upgrading a generation or so newer.That includes equiment of old. There is no misconception needing correction if you use common sense. Tech Jesus is just going for YT hits....

You assume everyone has the same tech knowledge and experience as the people on these forums.
 
My own personal experience, going from an R7 1700 to a 3900X, every single other bit of hardware EXACTLY the same, including the same windows install, is that the 3900X is far "smoother." This is outrageously apparent on multi-threaded games like Monster Hunter World or the Ubisoft open world titles.

I have a lot of background tasks going and I routinely maxed out my 1700, so this is absolutely not a surprise. I'm sure its a combination of More Cores, higher frequency, IPC and also that delicious, delicious cache size increase.

If I didn't want things running smoother then why the fuck would I have upgraded in the first place? Newer faster CPU is faster is... kinda the point?

Was that couple seconds of stutter upon starting a Plex transcode while I was simultaneously playing MH:World a game destroying situation? No. I lived with it for years.
Am I really fucking happy that its gone? Hell yes.
 
You assume everyone has the same tech knowledge and experience as the people on these forums.

If they don't have any experience or even the basic level of tech I don't think they would be following Tech Jesus...I assumed that as well. Point still stands.
 
Even if you used much of the same hardware, I'm almost certain you re-installed Windows since you had to change the motherboard and CPU out. If you didn't, then you probably should have. But if you did, that alone could be the reason for the increase in smoothness. I don't know what RAM you are using, but Ryzen benefits more from lower latency and higher speed RAM in a lot of instances so that too could contribute to that feeling too. Your SSD, if its an NVMe drive isn't going through the PCH, it's going directly to the CPU. Firmware can come into play as well. There are simply too many variables in an apples to cucumbers comparison like that. Comparing the two equally is difficult. Of course, in most workloads, the Ryzen is going to be faster as well due to having more cores and threads.

My team images hundreds of new identical machines each year. Guaranteed there will be units that are lightning quick and others that are dogs, (after the is image downloaded) both during the install and operating them afterward. If we do a batch of 8 computers, as many as 3 take up to 3 times longer and 1 maybe a rocket. I can't explain how or why, as benchmarks show no difference. Network traffic has nothing to do with it, as the slow ones are slow at everything. The fast ones are insanely quick at everything. Booting up the OS, opening apps, whatever. The machines themselves rarely fail and show no signs of faulty components. Dell, HP/Compaq, prebuild standard ATX. Doesn't matter. We see this all the time.

I'm guessing the perception of "smoothness" is someone building a PC out of an exceptional batch of SSDs, or other components causing whatever it is that we have been experiencing for many years.
 
If they don't have any experience or even the basic level of tech I don't think they would be following Tech Jesus...I assumed that as well. Point still stands.

You'd be surprised. Stuff like this also tends to get directed to the less-than-common-sense capable folks at places like r/AMD.
 
What Tech Jesus purposely and admittedly left out was multitasking or overlapping application + game usage which often happens now.
Basic reality here is that if you're actually hurting for performance for something other than gaming, you should be looking at those benchmarks too. This is a gaming comparison, and one tied to price tiers at that.
I would have liked to seen frametime and pacing tests with both systems using a modern game + obs x264 streaming to see which was more heavily affected. Fact is more and more gamers are choosing to stream now and so having more cores and threads available is a big deciding factor and why AMD is clearly the better choice and really is “smoother” when you use it outside of just a controlled test.
You'd typically want to be leveraging available fixed-function hardware to do the stream encoding on an Intel CPU with QuickSync or an Nvidia GPU too. I get using CPU cores if you're going for absolute quality, but even then, you're chasing your tail if you're trying to do that real-time (or just have money to burn).
 
1. I actually reinstall quite often. I was not migrating an old install but I also wasn't going from an install that was more than 6 months old.
2. Friend with a nearly identical setup, 5ghz 7800x, made the swap to a 3900x and different board but same SSD/RAM as well and migrated his Win10 install and he reports the same exact feel that you will write off.
3. There is no point in trying to dispute the "feel" claims as your argument will always boil down to "well it's new hardware vs old" or "well there are other factors because you can't just drop a ryzen cpu into an x299 board..." Well guess what, they kind of work in concert so how exactly are you going to get a scientifically fair comparison? The whole claim is that the experience is smoother/better and until you can quantify the experience across a broad range of users that made the switch with equivalent systems I don't believe you have any ground to stand on higher than mine.

1.) Why would you reinstall quite often? What do you consider often? This behavior also doesn't make much sense. If you reinstall quite often, then why not when changing motherboards? Changing motherboards, chipsets, etc. usually makes an OS reinstall a pretty good idea. It's not 100% necessary, but you can avoid potential problems by doing so.
2.) Well, placebo effects are not necessarily confined to a single person. Two people with a financial investment in their new hardware doing something similar, with likely yield the same results. By replacing the boards and CPU's, you won't have these two configurations side by side either. That said, I didn't write off your experiences. I'm not doubting the new system configuration is faster than the old one. I'm simply stating that there are mitigating reasons behind what you are feeling that explain it without saying some bullshit like "Ryzen is smoother." All things being equal, it simply isn't. That's what you aren't getting. Things are not equal in your example. You are comparing a 8c/16t CPU with a very different platform to a 16c/32t CPU on a newer and yet very different platform. It isn't that simple. Is that simple enough to understand?
3.) When we are talking about new hardware vs. old, the newer hardware will usually provide a better experience. That's kind of how things work. What I said about fair comparisons is difficult to do as most people don't necessarily do things to create the most accurate comparisons between the two platforms. You replaced your old CPU with a newer, faster one, but that by itself does not prove AMD's Ryzen is smoother than Intel's offerings.

As for having higher ground to stand on, I believe I do. I've had the 9900K, 3900X, 3950X, 10900K, and 10980XE running in the same room next to each other with most of those at the same time. I've run these chips on multiple motherboards across a wide variety of tests. I continue to do reviews even though HardOCP is no longer around and I've had this hardware in hand, side by side. I have multiple copies of the same drives and other hardware. It makes making such a comparison easier. In the example I gave between the 3900X and the 9900K, I wasn't even looking for such a difference when I found one. When comparing the Core i9-10980XE to the Ryzen 9 3950X, I couldn't tell any difference at all. That Intel Core i9-10980XE is closer to a Ryzen 3950X than your 7800X or 7820X is. It has more L3 cache and is closer on core counts.

In addition to being on the test bench for reviews, I've had people over at my house to play games on the test bench machines. They can't seem to tell the difference between a 3900X and a 9900K. So yes, I do believe I have enough information to say that Ryzen 3000 series CPU's are not smoother than Intel's Core i9 9900K, 10980XE or 10900K.
 
Basic reality here is that if you're actually hurting for performance for something other than gaming, you should be looking at those benchmarks too. This is a gaming comparison, and one tied to price tiers at that.

You'd typically want to be leveraging available fixed-function hardware to do the stream encoding on an Intel CPU with QuickSync or an Nvidia GPU too. I get using CPU cores if you're going for absolute quality, but even then, you're chasing your tail if you're trying to do that real-time (or just have money to burn).

Not really, if you play a modern game and aim for anything near 90%+ gpu utilization, even nvenc is not good enough and causes frame losses in obs. At that point you’d be much better off with a cpu that has a high core/thread count which is why I specifically mentioned it.
 
My team images hundreds of new identical machines each year. Guaranteed there will be units that are lightning quick and others that are dogs, (after the is image downloaded) both during the install and operating them afterward. If we do a batch of 8 computers, as many as 3 take up to 3 times longer and 1 maybe a rocket. I can't explain how or why, as benchmarks show no difference. Network traffic has nothing to do with it, as the slow ones are slow at everything. The fast ones are insanely quick at everything. Booting up the OS, opening apps, whatever. The machines themselves rarely fail and show no signs of faulty components. Dell, HP/Compaq, prebuild standard ATX. Doesn't matter. We see this all the time.

I'm guessing the perception of "smoothness" is someone building a PC out of an exceptional batch of SSDs, or other components causing whatever it is that we have been experiencing for many years.

This is a good point. I've done this kind of work as well. You aren't wrong, but on more modern equipment, newer stuff is usually so fast that this effect is almost entirely mitigated. When it isn't, you can often track the issue down to some piece of hardware with a different PCB revision, different firmware levels, and so on. Even among batches of identical systems they aren't necessarily truly identical. Silicon is binned according to spec ranges and its not identical. AMD's Ryzen 3000 series has proven this by being binned so close to the edge of what it can do. I've had multiple copies of the same CPU's on my test bench and found that inevitably, one of the two will boost more consistently or higher than the other one in the same circumstances. It's minor and usually still falls within an acceptable margin of error for benchmarking purposes, though I don't know if I've ever felt such a difference using two different 3700X's, or 3950X's.

One final note on that, is all the AMD Ryzen's I received direct from AMD were better than their retail counterparts. The two 3950X's I've used were both retail, but the first one I got boosted better than the one that's in my personal rig.
 
Im not watching the video. I love how Gamers Nexus gives an opinion and therefore it is law.

Smoothness is a human perception. It cant be quantified via maths. Its merely an opinion of the individual assessment of how a stimulus affects thier senses.

I find it funny that "AMD is not smoother". How do you even define that operationally?

I wished hardforums had a down vote feature so we could see how people really feel. Having just upvote or likes is a form of censorship because you can never know the truth about how an idea affects others.
 
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