The release of AMD's Ryzen 3000 CPU series earlier this month was met with mostly praise, and honestly for good reason. They're fantastic products, and the price-to-performance is absolutely staggering before you even take their competition into account. Part of the big praise for third generation Ryzen. The launch did not come without its bumps in the road, however. This is nothing new for a new product launch, and comes with a certain degree of expectancy. No, the true problem is that certain promised features are not exactly working as expected... or at all. Let's break it down.
Ryzen 3000 launched alongside a new chipset for motherboards, X570. However, a big selling point from AMD was the ability for owners of previous generation Ryzen CPUs to buy a part from the new lineup and put it into their older motherboards after a BIOS update. So your older B350 or X470 you bought for Ryzen 1000 or 2000 should be able to just have an update and fit in the new CPU and just work. The only feasible downside to not buying a ridiculously expensive X570 board is not gaining the new PCIe 4, which you just don't need at all anyways. Some of the really old and/or lower-end boards aren't forwards-compatable, but hey, this is still a great move for people who have been with the brand for the past couple years by offering them an upgrade path without having to get a new board.
Yeah, except shit isn't working. BIOS microcode which enables the new processors to work on 3 and 4-series boards is having some... problems. The general consensus is that some board models probably won't work, some will probably work, but even two from the same model might behave differently. To their credit, AMD and board manufacturers are working to get this all ironed out, but why did this even happen in the first place?
Plug-And-Pray
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of AMD, however I'm not delusional. They didn't enable new CPUs on old boards out of kindness, they did it to move units. Which is perfectly fine, except when that feature is promised and simply might not work. Had the marketing been "It SHOULD work on older boards" or even "It's currently somewhat buggy but we're getting there," then I wouldn't be so mad, but this was sold as "Update your BIOS and plug that bad boy right in there." Imagine the frustration of the people with 300 or 400 series boards who bought a brand new CPU and now have to wait an indefinite amount of time for the AGESA code to be finished. And this isn't even mentioning that Destiny 2 just simply isn't working on the chips, but once again, to be fair, AMD and Bungie are scrambling for this fix that really came out of left field (But really, no one at AMD tried Destiny 2 as a benchmark?). There's a fine line between "Early adopter issues" and "rushing a product to launch so all the promised features aren't ready yet." I get it: making a 7/7 launch because you're on a 7 nanometer node is neat, but I'm sure people who have a 3600 on their desk waiting for a fixed AGESA would've preferred to wait a bit.
But hey, this sort of thing isn't entirely new to us, is it? Yeah, that's right, I didn't forget about T-How up there.
The running joke with Bethesda games is that they absolutely will launch with bugs, and those bugs are more of features, really. Which is all fun and games when you can stack paintbrushes to ascend to the heavens or slash a single melon into 600 melons inside of someone's shop, but left unchecked and you'll end up with a big, fat 76. And you can't forget that Bethesda is far from the only offender.
Obligatory Colonial Marines .gif
Anthem suffered, along with many other issues, a host of glitches with its famously rocky launch. Mass Effect: Andromeda had a whole mountain of issues and crashes that absolutely plagues whoever was dumb enough to preorder that nightmare (AKA me..). The PC port of Arkham Knight was so bad that it was pulled from Steam while it was redone. Atlas is a thing that somehow surprisingly still exists despite being coded by a collection of insects that developed an ecosystem inside a programmer's keyboard. Shit, Final Fantasy XIV was so bad they redid the entire goddamn game. And the above-mentioned Fallout 76 was released as such an atrocious, buggy mess that it was a literal fucking crime. Look, I can go on and on here, and that's the problem. Software and hardware developers alike need to stop using the public as unwitting test subjects for their broken shit, plain and simple.
Way back when we started this whole Arcadist thing, we commented on how remarkable it was that a AAA studio released a finished, working game with Tom Clancy's Long Name: The Division 2. And that's the sad, sad state of things. When I buy an indie or early access game on Steam or even off of PSN I'm not surprised or too upset when I encounter a few issues, but why is everyone so quick to forget when these launches come from huge, renowned studios? The name "Bioware" used to mean a great product, but in the days of post-Andromeda and Anthem, the next time I see the studio name in a teaser there's no way the skepticism meter in my head is going to turn me off immediately. And don't even get me started on Bethesda, who botched every single aspect of Fallout 76 so poorly that I could've done better, and I've only just learned how to tie my shoes last week. Even less forgiving is when this happens from a company like AMD, who delivered finished, unalterable pieces of hardware into customer's hands. I can only imagine how furious I'd be at the company had I just bought a new CPU only for me to be waiting an unknown amount of time for the company to make it work on my motherboard, a feature which was one of the biggest selling points of the new CPUs. As annoyed as I get at the "vote with your wallet" phrase, it seems that in today's market where companies are truly pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with in terms of grossly under-delivering it should be the standard. Bethesda should not so easily shake off just how many beds they shat upon as soon as we get a new 8-second teaser for The Elder Scrolls VI. With this becoming such a common practice, the concept of pre-ordering absolutely anything at all is but a distant memory for me. I love this industry and I'm a fan of most of these companies, and it's unfortunate that we've entered into an age where I've come to expect broken games or features from the industry as a whole. Look guys, I believe in you all as companies to deliver the good products I know you can make. AMD can do better, EA can do better, and Bethesda ca-
