AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 1
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 27, 2012 12:00 AM ESTMinecraft
Switching gears for the moment we have Minecraft, our OpenGL title. It's no secret that OpenGL usage on the PC has fallen by the wayside in recent years, and as far major games go Minecraft is one of but a few recently released major titles using OpenGL. Minecraft is incredibly simple—not even utilizing pixel shaders let alone more advanced hardware—but this doesn't mean it's easy to render. Its use of massive amounts of blocks (and the overdraw that creates) means you need solid hardware and an efficient OpenGL implementation if you want to hit playable framerates with a far render distance. Consequently, as the most successful OpenGL game in quite some number of years (at over 7.5mil copies sold), it's a good reminder for GPU manufacturers that OpenGL is not to be ignored.
Minecraft does incredibly well on Trinity. While the improvement over Llano is only 15%, the advantage over Ivy Bridge is tremendous.
Civilization V
Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression. There are other games that are more stressful overall, but this is likely the game most stressing of DX11 performance in particular.
Civilization V shows some of the mildest gains in all of our tests vs. Llano. The 5800K/7660D manage to outperform Llano by only 8 -11% depending on the test. The advantage over Intel is huge of course.
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coder543 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
It's just a marketing strategy. The CPU performance is fine -- and look at the Starcraft 2 benchmarks in this very article if you want further confirmation of that. Anandtech was subtly hinting that the CPU performance is a step in the right direction.ganeshts - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
The HTPC oriented review is coming up at 11:00 AM ESTjwcalla - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Hopefully there will be some commentary on Linux driver support for those of us who take an interest in XBMC as an HTPC platform. :)In particular, hardware-accelerated video decoding.
Taft12 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Linux driver support will be the same as it always has been for brand new platforms. Non-existant. Give it a few months.coder543 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
that's simply not true. The proprietary graphics drivers for Linux use the same code that their Windows brethren do. Open source drivers? yeah, that's months away... but Linux does have support.coder543 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Check Phoronix -- they'll be posting some stuff soon.coder543 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I'm also with jwcalla -- can we see some Linux stuff?MrSpadge - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Did you see the frame rates at low resolution and detail? Game performance will absolutely tank at 1080p, no need to test this. And other HTPC duties haven't been tested here anyway.JNo - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
+11080p benchmarks are essential for a desktop part.
Also, whilst you're at it, you may as well make quality a minimum of 'medium' for 1377 and poss also include medium for 1680.
juampavalverde - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Well maybe im biased by the view of Scott, but read by yourself:http://techreport.com/blog/23638/amd-attempts-to-s...
AMD is telling what can be shown and what not... F off AMD, this aint a review, its a preview tailored by AMD Marketing, far of a whole fully product review, and the tailoring its exactly to offer a biased view of the product. Please make it clear Anand, the quality of your site is better than this AMD marketing bs.