Ryzen 1600 and gtx 1080?

[IsaacJan]

I'm building a dream gaming pc and one thing I really want to do is use emulators like pcsx2 and dolphin. However, I'm seeing people say bad things about AMD. Will the ryzen 5 1600 do the job? With the recent meltdown mess, would an intel still be better? I assume 1080 will do for GPU.

Also, my monitor is going to be 1440p 144hz, does that matter? I can plug into a tv with hdmi, which is what I'm probably going to do once I get things working for emulators.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

To be honest, if you really want to go AMD for an emulation build and you're patient, then you may want to wait 2 or 3 months for 2nd gen Ryzen to release which many predict to be 10% faster from clockrate improvement and maybe slight IPC increases.

144Hz does not matter and technically can be worse unless it supports g/freesync or can also run at 60Hz or 120Hz as displaying 30fps and 60fps games on 144Hz will have more judder, but depending on your sensitivity to these things you may never even notice it.

[IsaacJan]

(01-06-2018, 09:20 AM)Nintendo Maniac 64 Wrote: To be honest, if you really want to go AMD for an emulation build and you're patient, then you may want to wait 2 or 3 months for 2nd gen Ryzen to release which many predict to be 10% faster from clockrate improvement and maybe slight IPC increases.

144Hz does not matter and technically can be worse unless it supports g/freesync or can also run at 60Hz or 120Hz as displaying 30fps and 60fps games on 144Hz will have more judder, but depending on your sensitivity to these things you may never even notice it.

I don't REALLY need AMD, I was going to do it because of the meltdown crap. But I have no experience or first hand evidence. It's a gaming rig.

The monitor is a gsync 1440p 144hz dell.

[IsaacJan]

Didn't answer my question, can I play GameCube games with those?

[mbc07]

For Dolphin, Ryzen will work fine, for other demanding emulators (e.g. RPCS3, Xenia, etc), recent Intel CPUs might still have a small lead over AMD...

Regarding Meltdown, AFAIK the mitigations being rolled out at the moment makes no distinction between AMD and Intel CPUs, so, at least for now, both will suffer from the performance penalty, even through AMD CPUs are reportedly not vulnerable to Meltdown. There's also Spectre, which affects almost all CPUs from Intel, AMD and ARM from the past two decades and that reportedly affects performance as well. 

In other words, at least for now, you'll get some performance penalty regardless of which brand you choose, unfortunately =/

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

(01-06-2018, 04:01 PM)mbc07 Wrote: AFAIK the mitigations being rolled out at the moment makes no distinction between AMD and Intel CPUs

That was true sometime yesterday afternoon, but a second patch was submitted to the Linux kernel that excludes AMD CPUs from the Meltdown patch.

Also the Windows fix excludes AMD CPUs from the Meltdown patch.

(01-06-2018, 04:01 PM)mbc07 Wrote: There's also Spectre, which affects almost all CPUs from Intel, AMD and ARM from the past two decades

There's actually two variants of Spectre, and one of those variants require Linux configured with non-default settings and doesn't even occur on Windows while the other variant is more difficult to exploit on AMD CPUs than on Intel CPUs.

[JonnyH]

I believe the meltdown (the user/kernel/vm leak bug) workaround in both windows and linux are disabled on AMD CPUs, so there shouldn't be any performance impact from that. But that isn't likely to affect dolphin much at all, as it doesn't really rely on the things that happens to slow down much.

The fixes for the spectre part of these attacks, however, are not known at this point. Though, that only is necessary when trying to secure data in the same process as untrusted input (an obvious example being a web browser - it has to keep track of "secrets" like passwords while still reading data from random websites). As dolphin doesn't really contain any secrets, and only reads "trusted" data (the games it runs), it's unlikely whatever workarounds people come up with will be needed in dolphin.

So at the end of the day, both attacks probably won't affect dolphin much at all. No matter what CPU you're using.