'Fallout 4' And 'Star Wars Battlefront' Benchmarks On An AMD APU

[eodeo]

I liked the article. It showed that while not great, APU can handle the latest titles.

 

[Daniel Ladishew]

THANK YOU TOM'S!

This was more insightful than these flaming comments want you to believe. Some of us can't even buy a good mid-range motherboard, let alone extreme 2400MHz RAM or i7s. Heck, some of us have to build an entire system, monitor included, with the price of an i7-6700k.

You just proved that anyone with a low-end system (with a high-clock quad-core AMD cpu or better, that is) can play Fallout 4. And that no one with integrated GPUs can play SWB. See? Very useful!

Again, thank you.

Yes, so glad someone got the point of this article.

Look, everyone commenting on the RAM. Everyone knows that the faster RAM you have paired with an APU the more performance you will get. I have yet to see a ceiling on this effect. But, everyone already knows that. Just like the other systems used in the main articles for these games, this system wasn't made from all new parts, it was pieced together with what was available and used to test the game. These are not reviews, they are just quick looks at how example systems will performance while running the game and nothing more.

With that being our goal, we just used what is on hand. This isn't meant to tell you what the max performance you are going to get out of an APU is. We have real reviews of the APU itself which aim to answer that. This is to tell you how this basic budget system will perform. It isn't high-performance, but it is realistically what you would expect to see. For example, it wouldn't make any sense for us to use RAM capable of running at 2000+ MHz. Why? Because higher performance RAM costs more, and very few people are going to opt to buy one of these systems with high performance RAM, because they could just toss that money into a GPU or something else and end up with a completely different system.

So if you actually look at the goal of this article, it does exactly what it was meant to. It tells users that if you have a system with this performance or higher, chances are you can play these games at least on the lowest settings. That's it.

I have to disagree about the RAM. If your building a gaming system, budget or not, and you plan to use an APU, you would be remiss to not get the fastest RAM the system can handle. Yes, it's a price increase, but it's also a direct influence on gaming capability. Just like you wouldn't expect Fallout 4 to be playable on a 950, you shouldn't expect an APU to perform well with 1600 RAM. Also, if you look at the minimum system requirements for the game, it says you should have 2GB. Having a system that can only allocate <1GB is going to limit you even further. As this test shows, an avg framerate of 27FPS is all this can achieve. I really don't understand why any gaming system that cannot achieve 30 FPS is considered playable.

 

[Wisecracker]

What is lost in the *fog of commentary* is that THG (**The Authority on Technology**) can't seem to scrap together a single decent AMD rig.

That in itself speaks volumes . . .

 

[xrobertcmx]

I'm sorry, I understand the point of this article, but not how it was done. It was slapped together and failed to state the objective up front. It doesn't matter who may or may not be a fan boy, this was just poor journalism.
Given the sales I've seen (and taken advantage of) on RAM in the last few months there is no reasonable reason to use 1600. 16GB of 1866 can be had at between $60 and $70. I had some Gskill go bad and picked it up for $68 at NewEgg a month ago for my A10-5700 box. Secondly, why is the APU limited to 768MB? Mine Trinity based APU uses more then that just sitting idle. This is a box that was built a part at a time on a strict budget.
The thing is, I would say the same things if this was an Intel article.

 

[firefoxx04]

1866mhz ram can be found for the same cost as 160mhz ram, I have found that to be the case several times in the past few months.

If the point of the article was to show that the low of the low can still play modern games, it should have been mentioned when the specs were mentioned.

Less than 1GB of vram? Sata II hard drive? 1600mhz ram? Are you kidding me? My budget APU stuff can blow that rig out of the water.

Do these reviewers have any idea what they are doing? I really think they just dropped the ball on this because the specs were listed without saying "yeah we are using crappy crap because we want to see if it will still work." Just feels like AMD bashing.

 

[tuffjuff]

I, for one, found this article to be quite informative - though I do think it should be labeled or categorized differently. Perhaps a "How does it run?" category is appropriate, if you're taking seemingly random configurations and benchmarking on them?

Nevertheless, this article is hugely useful. I see that all 17 people who have both purchased an APU and then used it for gaming, are commenting on this thread about "what not to do." In the event I were ever in need of a 720p gaming desktop PC, this would help me tremendously.

 

[Valantar]

I suddenly realized Fallout 4 has no built-in benchmark tool, and Tom's hasn't posted their testing methodology anywhere that I can tell. Oh well. I still haven't finished my playthrough of Fallout 3 that I started a month or so before the release of F4, I guess I'll wait until I'm actually playing the game before I run any kind of in-game benchmarking. Don't want to spoil the fun, after all.

 

[jack_28]

I have a a10 7800 Amd Apu with 1866 ddr 3 ram (shared memory is 1 gb). igpu is stock at 720 mhz and I definitely get better fps then the system in the article above. and I haven't even overclocked anything. If I push the ram speed to 2400 and the igpu to 2gb shared memory I reckon I will get 30 percent more fps in games.

Youtube is filled with videos of the kaveri apu's performing better on these games with internal igpu's

If you are on a budget and playing games on a 19 ' or 20' monitor then these apus are the best solution for playing the latest AAA titles (with some settings turned off obviously).

Tom's Hardware should do an article with at least the a10 7850k and 2133 ram to show how well these Apu's really perform.

 

[rodbowler]

In line with many of the comments about this article: Please get a reasonably high end APU (8800p?), some fast low latency RAM and a decent motherboard that allows 2GB+ RAM to be allocated to the APU. See how far you can over-clock it in a stable manner and re-do your tests.
Otherwise you're simply going to look like pro-intel fanboys, praying for AMD to collapse and the end of any and all competition.

 

[Alec Mowat]

A crappy APU with slow RAM
What is this article supposed to represent?

I run 8 GB of 2133 Ghz DDR3 on my APU, 7850K, with 2 GB dedicated to the GPU. And I over clock both the core and GPU core.

That's how you run an APU system.

 

[Alec Mowat]

In line with many of the comments about this article: Please get a reasonably high end APU (8800p?), some fast low latency RAM and a decent motherboard that allows 2GB+ RAM to be allocated to the APU. See how far you can over-clock it in a stable manner and re-do your tests.
Otherwise you're simply going to look like pro-intel fanboys, praying for AMD to collapse and the end of any and all competition.

Intel competes with ARM processors now. They are making a large segment of computer sales, as desktop sales continue to decline.

 

[alextheblue]

No offense but you should learn which updated APU and motherboard to use. Also 1600MHz memory for an apu...common man?

This article really wasn't worth the effort to write it.

Not only that but you can also overclock the iGPU substantially.

But what I *really* want to see tested is an FX-8800P laptop. Why have we still not seen benches, they've been available in HP machines for a while now (among others) and they aren't terribly expensive. Configure one with decently fast dual-channel RAM and you could potentially have a tolerable budget gaming laptop.

 

[reclusiveorc]

Where are the benchmarks using hybrid crossfire?

 

[Alec Mowat]

Where are the benchmarks using hybrid crossfire?

Hybrid crossfire is garbage. You are better off with a R9 270 alone.

 

[Rich_1]

Typical from Toms Hardware.. they don't know what the hell they are doing.. they completely anhilated that system by using that RAM, I'm not saying that it would have had impressive results otherwise, but it would have faired waaaay better, the fastest RAM you can find is an obligatory requisite for an APU to perform well.. this is basic knowledge for someone that is supposed to review this kind of stuff.

 

[endy0307]

THANK YOU TOM'S!

This was more insightful than these flaming comments want you to believe. Some of us can't even buy a good mid-range motherboard, let alone extreme 2400MHz RAM or i7s. Heck, some of us have to build an entire system, monitor included, with the price of an i7-6700k.

You just proved that anyone with a low-end system (with a high-clock quad-core AMD cpu or better, that is) can play Fallout 4. And that no one with integrated GPUs can play SWB. See? Very useful!

Again, thank you.

YEAH NOICE TOM... you do know that gskill sells 2400hz ram for 55 bucks ??8gb kits?
,,,,,,,NEXT

 

[Janemba]

look.. APU is for 720p gaming.. not 1080p ......

 

[Quixit]

APU should honestly be ran with DDR3-2133 or DDR3-2400, not DDR3-1600. Even in Dual Channel mode, that's a MASSIVE difference in bandwidth for an APU, the graphics portion NEEDS that extra bandwidth, CPU not so much.

As for the motherboard, get one that lets you set the amount of memory, not the most generic of generics. Hell, even my mothers HP Desktop dedicates 25% of total system RAM to the graphics chip on an APU, 2GB dedicated out of 8GB, makes for a fairly decent little machine. Granted I have never gamed on it or attempted to.

But please, for the love of god, even if AMD isn't all that great, at least give it a flipping fighting chance with a decent board and RAM.

APU should honestly be ran with DDR3-2133 or DDR3-2400, not DDR3-1600. Even in Dual Channel mode, that's a MASSIVE difference in bandwidth for an APU, the graphics portion NEEDS that extra bandwidth, CPU not so much.

As for the motherboard, get one that lets you set the amount of memory, not the most generic of generics. Hell, even my mothers HP Desktop dedicates 25% of total system RAM to the graphics chip on an APU, 2GB dedicated out of 8GB, makes for a fairly decent little machine. Granted I have never gamed on it or attempted to.

But please, for the love of god, even if AMD isn't all that great, at least give it a flipping fighting chance with a decent board and RAM.

Who's going to pair a low-end CPU with very expensive high-end RAM?

 

[Benjiwenji]

Who's going to pair a low-end CPU with very expensive high-end RAM?

APUs are meant to be paired with fast RAM. The iGPU greatly benefits from high speed RAM as it uses system RAM instead of dedicated VRAM.

So to answer your question: Anyone who uses a APU.

Besides, this article is irrelevant.

1) No one uses 1600 RAM to game on an APU. If the point is to use a budget rig, then 2400 RAM would be fitting because 8 gb of 2400 RAM is only $30 USD. It doesn't get any more budget than that.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Memory: G.Skill Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-2400 Memory ($31.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $31.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-11-30 19:55 EST-0500

2) Richland APU is outdated as we approach 2016 with Kaveri being over a year old.

 

[Stardust342]

Another sub par article... Tom's Hardware is slipping.

 

[Quixit]

Who's going to pair a low-end CPU with very expensive high-end RAM?

APUs are meant to be paired with fast RAM. The iGPU greatly benefits from high speed RAM as it uses system RAM instead of dedicated VRAM.

Actually the vast majority of AMD APU sales are in sub $500 laptops. In these sort of systems cost is a big factor, most of them ship with 1600Mhz or slower RAM and sometimes only single-channel. Some mainstream manufacturers won't ever ship faster RAM because 1600Mhz is the fastest JDEC specification for DDR3, anything faster is technically out of spec.

It might be nice if they post up some scores for a typical Kaveri-based laptop I guess.

 

[Poprin]

I don't think this article is relevant at all, Tom's is a place for computer enthusiasts. A computer enthusiast on a budget would not put together an AMD APU machine like that at all.

I have an i7-2600 with a GTX 770 for serious gaming. However I also have an A10-7800 with 2133 RAM in a HTPC which I use to play an increasingly wide array of games in my living room @ 720p and it keeps impressing me the more and more I test it. Not to mention that it uses significantly less power than any rig with a dedicated GPU.

So why don't you test a proper APU setup (IMO with the most sensible and best APU currently available A10-7800) with a decent board and RAM. Which if you are on a budget with a little shopping around is still a cheap machine.

I'm no fanboy, but people who automatically discount AMD as second rate are simply mis-informed and IMO can't possibly have tested it themselves. AMD APU's are superb for a HTPC application. FX CPU's make great home server processors due to multi-threading and native ECC RAM support and virtualization.

It's also worth noting that in your Fallout 4 article that I read before this you did put some benchmark results up for a 7850k, so you must have had access to this processor at some point. Also it's interesting to notice that in the same article a much newer APU in an i7 laptop was benched beating the 7850k in the chart. So you might start to see where people reading Tom's articles might start to see a significant bias towards Intel.

 

[Alec Mowat]

Who's going to pair a low-end CPU with very expensive high-end RAM?

Me. I put my 7850k with 2133 Mhz (highest my board would support). The 2400 Mhz doesn't seem to give much performance boost, but without fast RAM, you are actually losing close to 25% of the performance or more. I get a huge difference when the RAM is at default and not using the profile correctly. Huge difference.