With AMD continuing to gain market share with its consumer-focused Ryzen series of CPUs and its X3D line-up becoming the go-to series for PC gaming enthusiasts seeking absolute best-in-class performance, it's beginning to feel like Intel is getting left behind. However, AMD's perceived 'better than Intel' CPU performance in the PC gaming and enthusiast space is still a relatively new thing, and only a couple of generations old.
However, in a new interview with the German outlet PC Games Hardware, Robert Hallock, Intel's VP and GM of its enthusiast channel business, notes that much of this stems from performance left on the table. And by that, he notes that software optimization is one of the key reasons that Intel's latest CPUs might be falling behind when you take a glance at performance charts.
"I truly believe, and this might get me in trouble, but I truly believe that the general PC gaming market and especially enthusiasts, like really hardcore PC enthusiasts, are significantly underestimating the importance of software to the PC experience, like really, really seriously," Robert Hallock says.
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Adding, "you can make the game faster with a faster piece of hardware, but there's always going to be 10, 20, 30% performance hidden behind the fact that that game was just not optimized for your CPU."
This raises an interesting fact that has been part of PC gaming for several years: optimizing for specific hardware leads to better performance. On the GPU side, if a developer spends more time optimizing for mainstream GeForce RTX GPUs, then that game will run faster on Team Green hardware. By that same token, if you look at the console-friendly Call of Duty, it's a game that favors AMD hardware because AMD hardware has been powering consoles for multiple generations now.
And in his comments, Robert Hallock implies that game developers are optimizing for AMD and Ryzen first, which makes Intel's gaming performance on its new Core Ultra 200 Series lower than it should be.
