One considerable aspect of it is that most of the racing sims are not particularly good at multi-threading. The Ryzen's have amazing multi-core performance, but their single thread computation capabilities are not that great compared to Intel CPU's. Personally I think you would be fine with a Ryzen too, but don't expect significant performance gains in R3E and rF2 for example.
Oh! No significant performance gains compared to my i5 4690 sounds that I can save the 1000 bucks I have to spend for a new PC with Ryzen. A new PC with i7-9700 costs 1.250 euro in my configuration. So, this get a significant performance gain? In fact it seems that I want to have 90 FPS solid instead of my 45 in the rift.
It seems they might've solved single-thread performance with Ryzen 3xxx series that should come around June
I'm bit late for the party, but on other game BeamNG.Drive single core performance is very crucial as CPU render is only on single core as well as heavy vehicle systems LUA which is engines, powertrains, ESC and fairly complex turbo modeling etc. That game has an benchmark feature that tests physics side, which is really heavy compared to any other game as they run 2000hz physics and have hundreds of dots connected by thousands of beams which make chassis flex etc. That benchmark then starts with 1 vehicle which shows 1 thread performance and goes up to 20 vehicles (you can run almost as many vehicles as your CPU has thread in latest version). What might be useful for you guys is this graph thing I made from different results people have posted (i7-6700 and i7-8086K are my results, 2700X results are from very reliable source): With my i7-6700 and gtx1080 I'm running race room at maximum graphics, except no lens things and no motion blur. I did GTR3 race at Zolder with maximum number of cars, starting from middle of pack and had only split second time where fps was less than 60fps, so that probably is maximum my system can do in Raceroom. I can see that my CPU gets bit warmer in Raceroom than some other games, so there is more CPU load, but I don't know which track car combos are heaviest in terms of single core performance. I'm quite impressed of what is achieved with an engine that uses DX9 though where drawcalls are quite expensive compared to more modern DX versions and especially compared to Vulkan. Anyway few more graphs, this is in practice single thread performance, although benchmark is bit tricky to run reliably, so any results that are somewhat close to each other can be also other way around, I'm sure only of my two cpu and 2700X being absolutely reliable numbers, probably many others too (4790K results are also reliable), but for example Ryzen 5 2600 I'm not 100% sure, it is so surprisingly low. I would need to update some graphs as 2600 is missing and I really would like to have more data on 9th gen and 8th gen Intel, but this little gives some idea about Ryzen performance already. Also this graph shows nicely how multiple core performance and single core performance spawns out, however people keep telling me they can't read it, for me it's simple, 1 is single core performance and further away from center, faster it is, 5 is 5 threads and so on: So, while Ryzen is bit behind Intel, they do have 1 or 2 models that are actually quite well performing even in single core department, but then they have lot of models that don't perform so well it seems. I'm waiting for 3rd gen too, should be good improvement in single core performance, which seems to be sticking as important aspect at least some time, multi core performance is then future stuff, but software might take few more years so might be that only next upgrade after 2-4 CPU generations is where we hopefully can forget single core performance for good. Overall I think CPU options start to finally look good for feeding fast GPUs, it has been quite weak for many years because of single core perfomance, but now CPUs are starting to provide some gains. UPDATE, I got results from 2600X stock and overclocked from one of Beam forum members, might be interesting for you guys too to see, if going to single core performance, for me it looks like to be 2700X or fast Intel chip, 2600X only with overclock as 6700 is hitting limits in order to keep 60fps in Raceroom with full grid and overclocked 2600X is pretty much same as 6700 at single core performance:
The first official Ryzen 3000 specs are certainly looking promising! ( But now the pricing is also similar to Intel's.) I might build my first AMD config afterall.