Good excuse to build another machine!
Have you tried the AMD mesa drivers? The open source driver performance doesn't look terrible, and in my own experience, it tends to work far better for OpenGL than AMD's proprietary GPU drivers.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rx-5700-...
I have been working with performance tools on Linux for over 10 years and occasionally debugged graphics issues.
I should note that the OpenGL stack on macOS isn't better than the Windows one either. Probably not surprising anybody, given the lackluster support that Apple has for it. We are seeing similar improvements with Metal as we do for Vulkan.
Windows OpenGL driver is so bad that running it through ANGLE with DX backend is faster.
I built a Threadripper 2 machine recently for home, but I don't know that it would have similar utility in a work environment where I could use something like Incredibuild to farm out compiles. Is that not an option for you in your work?
Mobile is also not Intel.
The only case to left are the Wintel PCs - and even that just makes Intel look bad since AMD CPUs run the games just fine. For the actual gaming experience it basically amounts to no difference at all.
I'll still need to keep some Intels around for VTune and optimizing deeply for AMD is going to be a chore... But given how the market is moving, I don't think I can avoid making AMD the primary development focus.
Ryzen < 2(!) has a much narrower AVX unit which could easily cause a 50% slowdown.
Branchy code like that of compilers tends to run somewhat slower on Ryzen, though closer to 15% than 50% (comparing AMD and Intel CPUs with otherwise same performance in mixed benchmarks). The latter really depends. Core and Ryzen have different branch predictors, both so complicated that they can't be fully described in documentation anymore. Ryzen 2's first level cache configuration also moved closer to Core's, presumably for software that has been fine-tuned for Core.
Specifically, in both a physics engine solver and some machine learning backwards passes I was working on, there are areas where a little false sharing is likely. It's relatively uncommon and a negligible concern on the smaller Intel chips I tested on, but Zen cores will sometimes have to synchronize with another CCX's caches and it seems to come with a penalty vastly larger than naively expected latency or IF bandwidth.
A fully loaded 2950x ended up getting beat by a 1700x in the solver despite having virtually the same architecture, twice the memory bandwidth, and an observed clocks advantage. Cutting the used thread count down to the same as the 1700x helped a little, but it looked like Windows was scheduling the threads on as many CCXs as possible and it ended up still being slower.
On the upside, the 2950x blasts through friendlier workloads like collision detection and inference with perfectly reasonable scaling.
I'm hoping that the dramatic redesign in Zen 2's memory architecture (unified IO die and whatnot) will help things a little. If not, I'll probably have to rework some stuff.
On the GPU side though, at least with the modern APIs (Vulkan, D3D12 and Metal), AMD isn’t too far behind Nvidia. I actually prefer RenderDoc to Nvidias Nsight because I can capture multiple frames instead of pausing the application to look at one frame at a time. That being said though, the OpenGL tooling for AMD is abysmal and so is their OpenGL driver. All things being equal, just swapping an Nvidia card for an AMD card gives around 40-50% speed up when running OpenGL purely by getting rid of the driver overhead. Although with Vulkan AMD and Nvidia are actually on par, so at least that’s solving itself for us.