At this point, is there any practical difference between Ryzen and Kaby Lake for gaming? Like, if you put the same game side by side are you going to notice a difference?
Because I don't really notice one in those comparison videos, but they put the stats on screen as well which maybe fools you a little into thinking it's different.
I feel like an i7-7700K is going to give you a more consistent gaming experience.
While the Ryzen CPUs
can perform well in games, there are other times when they do not perform well in games at all.
Though there are games where my R7-1700X is running at 70%+ load and the GPU is being fully utilized, there are also games where it's only sitting at 10-20% load and the GPU is being completely under-utilized.
I started playing
Firewatch, and that goes from 95-100 FPS down to 45-50 FPS when I turn the camera 90° in some places, with GPU utilization dropping really low.
The CPU is completely under-utilized; about 20% total usage and no single core above 50% load - and I can't help wondering if a 7700K would be performing better.
It may not though; I really can't say without having one for comparison.
As always, overclocking the memory from 2666MT/s to 3600MT/s only boosts framerates by about 4 FPS in these situations, so it doesn't really help much.
It may help framerate consistency, but I've yet to see these 20+ FPS increases from faster RAM that some places have reported.
As long as it's not running at 2133MT/s, I don't think you're losing a huge amount of performance.
On the other-hand, even games which are known for poor optimization, like the Telltale Batman game, was running at 3440x1440 at 90-100 FPS almost constantly with the GPU fully utilized, when it struggled to run at 1080p60 on my i5-2500K using the same GTX 1070.
Now an i7-7700K might do an equally good job of it, but I was not dissatisfied with how the R7-1700X handled it.
ABZU is another game where I was very impressed with the R7-1700X's performance as that's very demanding on CPUs in places.
Since I also upgraded to a 3440x1440 display when I built this PC, I've been thinking about replacing the 1070 I have with a 1080 Ti, and I'm a bit concerned the 1700X is not going to be able to take full advantage of a faster GPU like that.
I'm okay with the 1070 not running at 100% utilization all the time if it's still giving me good performance, but the fact that it's not always pegged at 99% in all games suggests that a faster GPU might not improve performance as much as it should.
At the same time, upgrading from an i5-2500K to the R7-1700X has really shown me just how under-utilized the GTX 1070 was.
I never expected it to handle 3440x1440 at 100Hz half as well as it has, when 1080p60 seemed to be a struggle when it was paired with the i5-2500K.
In the majority of games I've been able to use it at native resolution with most settings turned up and it's still running at 75+ FPS.
I've also been very happy with how the R7-1700X performs in non-gaming tasks.
For media editing/encoding it's a much bigger upgrade than I was expecting.
So I don't regret buying one, I just don't know that I'd recommend it when gaming is the primary focus, if you aren't also streaming or recording/editing on it.
I think it's going to be really interesting to see how the 6-core Ryzen CPUs - or even the 4c8t CPUs compare to an i5-7600K though.
The lack of hyperthreading can make a big difference in some games, and not only do the R5 CPUs have SMT, they have two more physical cores.
In the lower price segments, it seems like Ryzen is going to be a more obvious choice than the R7-1700/X against the i7-7700K, where which CPU is better really depends on your expected usage.
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