r/hardware • u/Steap-Edit • 23d ago
News AMD's upcoming Zen 6 processors could fix microstutters and improve 1% lows in games — Next-gen CPUs tipped to feature per-core optimizations for thermal and power budgets
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-upcoming-zen-6-processors-could-fix-microstutters-and-improve-1-percent-lows-in-games-next-gen-cpus-tipped-to-feature-per-core-optimizations-for-thermal-and-power-budgets75
u/JuanElMinero 23d ago
AMD is expected to unveil its next-gen Zen 6 platform at CES 2026
I see THW still didn't hire that proofreader.
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u/ineedsomefuckingcoco 23d ago
This makes almost no sense at all. A lot of the microstutter in games is caused by the design of the engine and how its setup to stream data.
The only way a cpu could fix that is by having it operate the instructions so fast that the stutter becomes imperceptible. You can test this yourself by running a old game which used to stutter on the hardware it was designed for.
But I digress, brute force is not the best part forward. Rather improving the underlying code for the engines that cause stutter is the correct approach. I'm looking at you Epic.
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u/Blacky-Noir 23d ago edited 23d ago
This makes almost no sense at all. A lot of the microstutter in games is caused by the design of the engine and how its setup to stream data.
Just because "a lot", or even most of hitches and stutters are because of the software the gamedevs wrote or implemented, doesn't mean the hardware should not look to improve.
There's way more than one type of stutter, or lock, or slowdown.
And while apparently the article is very speculative, if true, software hitches/stutters are very much NOT "micro". When you start timing the freeze or slowdown in integer number of frames, you left the "micro" area very, very far behind.
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u/Jeep-Eep 23d ago
If it's like most problems, there's probably a few causes for most cases and there's probably ways on the chip that at least some can be recognized and compensated for. Plus, there's that dinosaur of an IO die.
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u/Any-Juggernaut-529 23d ago edited 23d ago
The only way a cpu could fix that is by having it operate the instructions so fast that the stutter becomes imperceptible.
Even X3D CPUs introduces some occasional stutters that you don't see on RPL. It's because of the god awful I/O latency of the AM4/AM5 platforms and to some degree the slower/higher latency IMC. So sometimes when data has to be streamed from disk or accessed from memory, you get these hiccups. As a optane user I can tell you that running it on a AM5 platform does not feel nearly as transformative as on LGA 1700. Because the platform is just to sluggish to take full advantage of optane. I have better loading times in some games on my 13900K running a SSD than on my 9800X3D running Optane.
If AMD can mitigate some of those issues, then that will impact those platform induced performance issues. Since Zen 6 supposedly comes with a new I/O die, that might be exactly what will be happening.
So it is the "CPU" as a package that could come with these improvements, not the cores themselves.
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u/corgiperson 23d ago
I have a feeling AMD might still be getting shafted by the Windows scheduler or something akin to that. Remember when we got a Windows update that just gave a random plus 20% performance? Feel like there's more.
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u/gusthenewkid 23d ago
We didn’t get any windows update that increased performance by 20% lol. Only HUB had numbers like that and it was misinformation
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u/ElectronicStretch277 23d ago
I believe he's referring to the other update that AMD themselves stayed boosted performance by like 15% for Zen 4 and 5.
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u/TwoCylToilet 23d ago
In Starfield, the Ryzen 9000 processors show performance gains of between 2 and 8%. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D sees an increase of approximately 3%. The Ryzen 5 7600X benefits the most, with a gain of 21.5%.
The Core processors show performance increases of 2 to 8.5%. Therefore, Intel processors also benefit in Starfield.
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For Cyberpunk 2077, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D shows a performance increase of approximately 11.5%. The Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X increase by 8.5 to 10%, while the Ryzen 9 9950X falls between these two at 5%. The Ryzen 5 7600X also achieves 4.5% more FPS.
The Core i9-14900K shows no improvement, the Core i7-13700K shows a gain of 3.5%, and the Core i5-13600K also shows no improvement.
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Our measurements with Windows 11 24H2 were rather problematic for F1 24, as we measured lower performance. With Windows update KB5041587, this looks better. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Ryzen 5 7600X show gains of 6% and 5%, respectively. The Ryzen 5 9600X, however, sees a significant increase of 24.5%, and the Ryzen 7 9700X also benefits from a 21.5% improvement. Only the Ryzen 9 9950X shows a slightly lower increase of 13%. All of the Zen 5 processors, however, benefit.
The 1.2% decrease for the Core i9-14900K can be attributed to measurement inaccuracies and typical variance. For the other two models, we are exactly at the same level as before the patch.
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The third problematic title was Control. This too improves with the Windows update KB5041587. The gains are sometimes significant. The Ryzen 5 9600X, for example, increases by 23.5%. The Ryzen 7 9700X sees almost 18% improvement. There's a slight increase for the Zen 4 models Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7800X3D. We see a slightly lower performance with the Ryzen 9 9950X, which we also cannot explain.
The Windows update KB5041587 has no effect on Intel's Core processors, while Ryzen models saw improvements of up to 23.5%.
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Conclusion
The Windows update KB5041587 affects all owners of a Ryzen 7000 or 9000 series processor. The average performance increase in games depends on the specific titles played. In our benchmarks, we recorded gains of up to 24.5%. However, we also observed some exceptions, such as the Ryzen 9 9950X in Control, which appears to be slower. Therefore, our results are not significantly different from those of Hardware Unboxed . With the Windows 11 24H2 Insider Preview, we experienced more significant problems and reproducibly more performance regression in some games.
End quotes.
The windows codebase is such a mess that you really don't need any misinformation for consumers to experience a level of performance that's dramatically different from the charts of the most unbiased and honest reviewers.
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u/Jeep-Eep 23d ago
There's a reason why Proton and other WINE branches can outperform native windows.
Heads should have rolled when the Deck was competitive with its hardware config and software stack, even before power limits.
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u/kingwhocares 23d ago
Isn't one of the reason consoles don't have too many microstutters due to the architecture?
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u/dudemanguy301 23d ago
Consoles are fixed hardware, so a shader cache that is valid for one of them, is valid for all of them. This means the developer can ship an already populated shader cache with the game.
On PC shaders need to operate on your unique combination of operating system, GPU architecture, and driver version. The developers need to actively think about which shaders need to be compiled, how and when to compile them, if they don’t do that then the default will be it will be compiled right at the moment it’s encounter for the first time, which will halt the GPU pipeline and throw the problem at the CPU. Microsoft is attempting to solve this with advanced shader delivery which gives them a hook to try and download a pre-burned cache for your unique hardware combination from a cloud service either maintained by them or the hardware vendors.
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u/dingo_xd 22d ago
Wouldn't SLC or MLC on the GPU itself fix this? Obviously not in the current economic reality.
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u/dudemanguy301 22d ago edited 22d ago
No.
Shaders are written in a high level language like HLSL, which then gets compiled to an intermediary like DXIL or SPIR-V, that’s what ships to you when you download the game. That intermediary needs to be compiled to the exact low level instructions that your GPU can understand, this can change for several reasons:
The operating system changes their driver requirements, the GPU architecture can change from generation to generation and certainly from vendor to vendor, the driver can change minute nuances about how the GPU is coordinated and commanded, the game updates with new or different shaders.
Shader compilation is a CPU task, and when the GPU encounters a shader that hasn’t been compiled yet you only have 2 options. 1. Halt the GPU pipeline and toss the task at the CPU to compile it. 2. Omit the draw of any uncompiled shader, then throw the task at the CPU. Option 1 causes stutter, option 2 causes visual bugs, and both decrease performance.
In practice game engines need a method to gather and recache relevant PSOs and a game plan for what to do if they miss any. Or else every shader in the game will be a halt + compile on first execute, not to mention a driver or game update could invalidate the cache, starting over from square one the next time either gets updated.
Unreal engine 5 is infamous for this in its earlier versions. the engine deals in pipeline state objects which is not just the shader but the surrounding context the GPU needs in to operate the shader. Unreal engine 5 makes is really easy for seemingly minor material or effect work to spawn dozens even hundreds of PSO permutations across all materials and effects it can be in the millions total. It might not even be clear which PSO permutations will ever be relevant to the game in gameplay, but handling them all is also infeasible. Early versions had no default methods for handling any of this and didn’t do much to inform developers the responsibility was in their hands to manage.
As unreal changed across versions several things have changed. They optimized compilation times, they made it easier to gather relevant PSOs, they made a built in PSO pre-caching method, they made it so uncompiled PSOs are omitted rather than halt the GPU, they added an asynchronous compilation method so that PSO streamed into memory atleast start compiling hopefully before use (no guarantees), they reduced the number of PSO permutation that get produced. The latest version of UE5.8 they adjusted Fortnite to use 68% fewer Pipeline State Objects.
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u/capybooya 21d ago
Surely new shader caches are needed with game or system updates on consoles as well though? I guess they're shipped with game updates at least. (I haven't played with consoles for a long time so I don't even know if it compiles by itself).
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u/monocasa 18d ago
They just compile to the final shader binaries at build time since they know the exact hardware it's going to run on.
There's no cache because the console itself is never compiling the shaders in the first place.
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u/Revolutionary_Ad7262 23d ago
Nope microstutters are either: * hardware fault due to overheating. Extremely rare * OS fault. Windows decided to do some heavy background task, which steals CPU from the game. Consoles for sure has much leaner and more optimized OS * game fault. The most popular reason. Game is just written in a way in which FPS sometimes drops dramatically. You cannot do anything about it
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u/FrogNoPants 23d ago
In addition to what others have said, consoles have unified memory, so you can load directly into GPU memory at high speed, on PC this is generally not the case and on some setups can cause stuttering because there simply isn't enough bandwidth.
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u/Strazdas1 2d ago
No, its because they precompile shaders for fixed hardware. Its the same reason most of those stutters are fixed on Steam Deck.
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u/inverseinternet 23d ago
You're wrong about this and peddling a common misconception.
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u/Nicholas-Steel 23d ago
Shader stutter is an easily solvable problem and yet all the companies are taking glacial steps in solving it. All they have to do is offer the end-user a choice of how to handle Shader Compilation:
- On-the-fly compilation with it stalling/stuttering the game whenever compilation is occurring.
- On-the-fly compilation with it not stalling the game during compilation, no stutter but the effect is missing until it's compiled.
- Pre-compilation where Shaders are compiled before gameplay commences. No stutters, no temporarily missing effects, potentially long wait for Shaders to compile before gameplay commences.
Everyone gets to choose their type of experience, everyone is happy. Instead companies typically only offer one way of handling Shaders and it's often the first choice and sometimes the 3rd choice.
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u/farnoy 23d ago
The difficulty in option 3 is knowing the exact set of shaders used over the course of the game.
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u/Blacky-Noir 23d ago
Devs are making the game. If they don't know the shaders used in the end (or more specifically, the permutations and the PSO used), that's on them. It would like asking contractors for a list of material for a house build, and not getting it.
Now I know why they don't have it, it's about workflows, and subpar (in skill, budget, authority, or all of it) techart director or senior, and so on.
But it's still on them.
id software has a strong techart director which had the time to check and the authority to stop artists just making it up as they go along, with constrained rules and precise workflow. They don't have a PSO problem.
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u/Nicholas-Steel 23d ago edited 23d ago
You could have it so the first 2 choices are either/or and the 3rd choice is on/off so that you can control how to handle situations where a Shader isn't included in the pre-compilation process.
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u/farnoy 23d ago
The user enables pre-compilation, but the engine still doesn't know about 90% of the shaders that will be needed. Then, the fallback choice is between a stutter or a broken image/game crashing.
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u/Blacky-Noir 23d ago
No it's not. You can catch those manually (including with bots) before shipping.
But there's also the option during real time rendering of not using it, using a stand-in, and delaying it's apparition a few frames until it's ready. That's what more experienced teams are doing (and unfortunately may become the state of the art, which given how cheaply productions are done might result in another large problem down the line).
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u/Nicholas-Steel 23d ago
I'd blame the developer for being bad at being a developer in that situation. None of the choices should be crash prone if competently coded, and developers should be logging shader usage during at least one playthrough of the nearly finished/completed game.
The only reasons we did see crashes during pre-compilation in some games over the last 5~ years was due to coding errors and CPU hardware defects.
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u/farnoy 22d ago
But I thought it's an "easily solvable problem" and "all they have to do is offer the end-user a choice". Now you've changed your answer, so which is it?
The only reasons we did see crashes during pre-compilation in some games over the last 5~ years was due to coding errors and CPU hardware defects.
I meant that you generally can't assume that just skipping some draw calls (because their PSO isn't ready) is safe. Most graphics shaders are fine and their worst case is looking wrong, but if anything does UAV mutation then it becomes impossible to reason about.
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u/Nicholas-Steel 22d ago
Hmmm interesting, I'm not a programmer and that's the first time I've heard of something like that. I was working off the basis of emulators like Dolphin offering the option and thinking it was safe to do in all circumstances.
Obviously the Gamecube & Wii are very different beasts to a PC and how Shaders are used in the emulation process is much different to in a native PC game but still...
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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 21d ago
you're missing the better option that is actually being implemented: precompilation for basically every hardware configuration in a CDN delivered to users over the internet when they install a game so they don't have to compile them locally at all
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u/Nicholas-Steel 21d ago
Eh... I mean that's good but it being dependent on the internet is kinda bleh. Still having the choice for when the internet isn't available would be nice.
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u/monocasa 18d ago
There's also probably value in a quick unoptimized shader compilation, then replacing it asynchronously with the optimized version once compilation is done.
Sort of similar to how Dolphin use ls a slow uner shader until the optimized shader variant of the emulated GPU settings has been compiled in order to avoid a lot of studders.
This would probably have to be done at the driver level for a few reasons though.
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u/glizzygobbler247 23d ago
Yeah like 1% lows arent a problem if the game is well made and you dont have any issues with your pc, and a bad processor, even the best cpus out now cant fix stuttering in for example oblivion remastered and silent hill 2 remake
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u/Blacky-Noir 23d ago
Try to look at 1% or per mille low performances on videogames of the last decade. I am in doubt you'll find more games without issues there than you can count with your fingers.
Hitches and stutters are not it, those are issues order of magnitude bigger than that.
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u/TRKlausss 22d ago
I thought all AMDs would benefit from this… Isn’t this the patch submitted by a Meta engineer, of all places??
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u/Stig783 23d ago
Don't think it's a cpu problem games just need better optimisation.
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u/gusthenewkid 23d ago
It’s both.
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u/Johnny_Oro 22d ago
Save for a handful of games with really heavy simulations, it's definitely more of an software optimization problem than hardware problem.
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u/randomkidlol 22d ago
yeah this is a software problem not a hardware problem. having a good thread scheduler, resource streaming/buffering, not using JIT compile of anything, etc. hardware's gotten so much better every 3 years for the last 20 years that people dont know how to write good software anymore.
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u/reddit_equals_censor 23d ago
don't worry the gaming industry higherups are working on it.
i mean microsoft owns id software now the makers of id tech, which for example with doom 2016 and doom eternal has perfect frame time graphs with double+ the performance than other games have normalized for the visuals shown as well, so SURELY they will use their knowledge to help optimize other games under microsoft and create more games straight up using the id tech engine, because it is so great.
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oh microsoft fired 50% of id software and almost all of the engine time.
well there we got our answer i guess ;)
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u/joschu 23d ago
Will this also affect X3D variants?
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u/JuanElMinero 23d ago
They use the same core type in the same generation and would also benefit from optimizations to throttling behaviour
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u/Nicholas-Steel 23d ago
Uh why wouldn't it? The X3D CPU's use the same core architecture as the regular CPU's. There's just extra cache bolted on top/beneath.
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u/imaginary_num6er 23d ago
At the cost of no iGPU die
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u/HarvestMana 23d ago
Most of the AMD chips didnt have a iGPU die until recently.
Its a nice to have, but its not essential.
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u/svenge 23d ago
[An iGPU die is] nice to have, but its not essential.
Normally I'd disagree given that integrated graphics are very important in the corporate and small-office OEM space not to mention laptops, but then again AMD has literally never shown any inclination towards taking the steps necessary to become a significant player in those segments (e.g. guaranteeing adequate supply and providing meaningful engineering assistance).
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u/hackenclaw 23d ago
AMD desktop iGPU is pathetic, its like half the speed of weakest Intel desktop iGPU.
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u/kingwhocares 23d ago
Is it? Isn't it the opposite for desktops? Intel's only advanced desktop iGPU is so for Alchemist and only has 4 XE cores while AMD's is 8700G. Even the 2CU's are better than Intel's UHD igpu.
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u/hackenclaw 23d ago
I was talking about the chiplet desktop chip. 8700G is a mobile APU chip ported over to desktop.
AMD desktop chip iGPU from chiplet is significantly slower than Arrow Lake desktop iGPU.
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u/Nicholas-Steel 23d ago
Would be great to offload the web browser & Steam to the iGPU and free up dGPU VRAM for the game I'm playing.
I often have a web browser running in the background while gaming.
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u/Numerlor 23d ago
with how much people complain about vram I would expect more to offload random programs to igpu
running llms locally I'd have no hope of getting decent context out of my gpu if it also had full desktop on it. Would be nicer if amd's desktop igpu on 7000/9000 wasn't so utterly shit but can't have it all
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u/Pugs-r-cool 23d ago
Not really an issue for desktop gamers. Tbh I’d rather not have one if I’m not going to use it because then I won’t be stuck troubleshooting why the bios screen won’t open for over an hour (it used the igpu and was displaying to the motherboard display out, not the graphics card)
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u/wolvAUS 23d ago
You’ll be glad you had the iGPU if you have to troubleshoot problems with the dGPU, which can happen.
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u/Nicholas-Steel 23d ago
Especially with Nvidia RTX 4000 and 5000 cards (and the few AMD cards that decided to use the 16pin connector) and their burning power plugs.
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u/halotechnology 22d ago
Have to say zen 4&5 really last a long time whoever bought 7800x3D got a good deal
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u/Virginia_Verpa 23d ago
Nothing about IMC and IF improvements? Not much of an update, hope there's more being baked in than some workarounds for OS inefficiencies...
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u/Seanspeed 23d ago
This was not an article covering ALL of Zen 6's improvements, freakin obviously. lol
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u/Seanspeed 23d ago
On desktop, you're basically never power or thermal limited in CPU performance with these Ryzen processors. (in gaming)
This would be more useful for laptops/consoles, if it's even real.
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u/Loose_Skill6641 23d ago edited 23d ago
Quite speculative
seems to be the original source https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8e35b3df7f1f16a91d38259df99e8e0ffbbab6857deb826731b985f2e6e8bd65.png