Basically, overclock and tweak a bit to gain on performance. The AMD Blog hints like this, get the newest available motherboard BIOS, clean OS installs help, buy memory that works at a top speed and latency (supported by your motherboard) and change the Windows 10 power plan.
AMD also shares a performance plot indicating a the changes and how they can influence 1080p game performance. As we have been stating in our articles, large gains come from software and memory tweaks. But surely overclocking helps:
The AMD Ryzen™ processor is a completely new and different platform from what gamers may be accustomed to, and established practices for configuring a system may prove incorrect or unreliable. We’ve assembled the following configuration steps to ensure users are extracting the best possible performance and reliability from their new PC.
Ensure that you are using the latest UEFI ROM for your motherboard.
AMD Ryzen processors have an appetite for faster system RAM, but it’s important to ensure that you have a solid setup before proceeding.
DDR4 Speed (MT/s) | Memory Ranks | DIMM Quantities |
---|---|---|
2667 | Single | 2 |
2400 | Dual | 2 |
2133 | Single | 4 |
1866 | Dual | 4 |
Make sure the Windows 10 High Performance power plan is being used (picture). The High Performance plan offers two key benefits:
In the near term, we recommend that games and other high-performance applications are complemented by the High Performance plan. By the first week of April, AMD intends to provide an update for AMD Ryzen™ processors that optimizes the power policy parameters of the Balanced plan to favor performance more consistent with the typical usage models of a desktop PC.
Ensure there are no background CPU temperature or frequency monitoring tools when performance is essential. Real-time performance measurement tools can have an observer effect that impacts performance, especially if the monitoring resolution (>1 sample/sec) is increased.
Overclocking is a time-tested and beloved way to squeeze even more “free” performance out of a system. That’s why every AMD Ryzen processor is unlocked for overclocking.2
Consider the example of the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 processor. It has a base clock of 3.0GHz, a two-core boost clock of 3.7GHz, an all-cores boost clock of 3.1GHz, and a 2-core XFR clock of 3.75GHz. Many have reported all-core overclocks of around 3.9GHz, which is a full 25% higher than the default behavior of the CPU.
To test the performance impact of all of these various changes, we threw together a brand new Windows 10-based system with the following specifications:
Throughout this process we also discovered that F1™ 2016 generates a CPU topology map (hardware_settings_config.xml) when the game is installed. This file tells the game how many cores and threads the system’s processor supports. This settings file is stored in the Steam™ Cloud and appears to get resynced on any PC that installs F1™ 2016 from the same Steam account. Therefore: if a user had a 4-core processor without SMT, then reused that same game install on a new AMD Ryzen™ PC, the game would re-sync with the cloud and believe the new system is also the same old quad core CPU.
Only a fresh install of the game allowed for a new topology map that better interpreted the architecture of our AMD Ryzen™ processor. Score one for clean computing! But it wasn’t a complete victory. We also discovered that the new and better topology map still viewed Ryzen™ as a 16-core processor, rather than an 8-core processor with 16 threads. Even so, performance was noticeably improved with the updated topology map, and performance went up from there as we threw additional changes into the system.
As an ultimate maneuver, we asked the question: “Can we edit this file?” The answer is yes! As a final step, we configured F1™ 2016 to use 8 physical CPU cores, rather than the 16 it was detecting by default. Performance went up again! After all was said and done, we gained a whopping 35.53% from our baseline configuration showing how a series of little changes can add up to something big.
The picture tells the story clear as day: configuration matters.
AMD Gives Pointers On How to Improve Ryzen 1080p game performance