id Software says its next-generation game engine will take full advantage of Ryzen’s multiple cores

Robert Duffy, id Software’s Chief Technology Officer, has teased new details about the capabilities of the company’s next-generation game engine. In a new video published by AMD on YouTube, Duffy says that the upcoming id Tech 7 engine will be able to take full advantage of Ryzen’s immense multi-threading performance, yet another promising sign in AMD’s efforts to get developers to optimize for Ryzen.

“We’re working on the next generation of id Tech right now, and we’re definitely going to optimize fully for Ryzen,” says Duffy. “The new engine tech that we’re working on is far more parallel than id Tech 6 was. We plan to really consume all the CPU Ryzen can offer.”

The flagship Ryzen 7 1800X is an 8-core/16-thread part, while the Ryzen 5 1600X has 6 cores and 12 threads, so Ryzen’s strategy has really been to out-muscle the competition in terms of multi-threaded capability at every price point.

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This puts a lot of computing power in the hands of consumers, and the additional cores can help people do things like live video encoding and streaming without too much of a performance impact.

That said, there’s still a long way to go in terms of Ryzen optimizations. Doom looks to be the only game that utilizes id Tech 6 now, and it’s not yet clear which titles will use id Tech 7.

And while Duffy did say that the upcoming Quake Champions will be taking advantage of Ryzen 7 and Vega, we’ll need many more of these small, additive contributions from developers before Ryzen matches Intel in terms of performance optimizations.

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