Marrying Vega and Zen: The AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review

iGPU Gaming Performance, Continued

Rise of the Tomb Raider

One of the most comprehensive games in the gaming benchmark suite is Rise of the Tomb Raider (RoTR), developed by Crystal Dynamics, and the sequel to the popular Tomb Raider which was loved for its automated benchmark mode. But don’t let that fool you: the benchmark mode in RoTR is very much different this time around.

Visually, the previous Tomb Raider pushed realism to the limits with features such as TressFX, and the new RoTR goes one stage further when it comes to graphics fidelity. This leads to an interesting set of requirements in hardware: some sections of the game are typically GPU limited, whereas others with a lot of long-range physics can be CPU limited, depending on how the driver can translate the DirectX 12 workload.

The GT 1030 sweeps the top spot against AMD here, though only by small margins most of the time. The AMD APUs still offer a commanding 2-3x performance jump over Intel's product line, and even more when price is factored into the equation.

Rocket League

Hilariously simple and embodying the elements of pick-up-and-play, Rocket League allows users to jump into a game with other people (or bots) to play football with cars with zero rules. The title is built on Unreal Engine 3, which is somewhat old at this point, but it allows users to run the game on super-low-end systems while still taxing the big ones. Since the release in 2015, it has sold over 5 million copies and seems to be a fixture at LANs and game shows. Users who train get very serious, playing in teams and leagues with very few settings to configure, and everyone is on the same level. Rocket League is quickly becoming one of the favored titles for e-sports tournaments, especially when e-sports contests can be viewed directly from the game interface.

With Rocket League, there is no benchmark mode, so we have to perform a series of automated actions, similar to a racing game having a fixed number of laps. We take the following approach: Using Fraps to record the time taken to show each frame (and the overall frame rates), we use an automation tool to set up a consistent 4v4 bot match on easy, with the system applying a series of inputs throughout the run, such as switching camera angles and driving around.

As the more eSports oriented title in our testing, Rocket League is less graphically intense than the others, and by being built on DX9, also tends to benefit from a good single thread performance. The GT 1030 wins again here, most noticably in the 99th percentile numbers, but the AMD chips are hitting 30 FPS in that percentile graph, whereas in the last generation they were getting 30 FPS average. That is a reasonable step up in performance, aided both to the graphics and the high-performance x86 cores. It will be interesting to see how the memory speed changes the results here.