AMD Carrizo Part 2: A Generational Deep Dive into the Athlon X4 845 at $70
by Ian Cutress on July 14, 2016 9:00 AM ESTMiddle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor at 3 GHz
The final title in our testing is another battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Shadows of Mordor. Produced by Monolith using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity to a large extent, despite having to be cut down from the original plans. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
For testing purposes, SoM gives a dynamic screen resolution setting, allowing us to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. As a result, we get several tests using the in-game benchmark, taking results as the average and minimum frame rates.
For this test we used the following settings with our graphics cards:
| Shadow of Mordor Settings | |||
| Resolution | Quality | ||
| Low GPU | Integrated Graphics | 1280x720 | Low |
| ASUS R7 240 1GB DDR3 | |||
| Medium GPU | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB | 1920x1080 | Ultra |
| MSI R9 285 Gaming 2G | |||
| High GPU | ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB | 1920x1080 3840x2160 |
Ultra Ultra |
| MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G | |||
Carrizo takes miniture solace here in that it beats the Kaveri CPU at 4K with a GTX 980, albeit within the margin of error. SoM typically performs very similar no matter the processor, especially on NVIDIA cards. We haven't included the R9 285 results, as there seems to have been a recent update pushing values 30% higher than expected for the Kaveri on this GPU, and given the results trend it would seem to be more than simply L2 or PCIe lane difference, especially to the Trinity/Richland parts.
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aryonoco - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Oh great, another AMD Bulldozer CPU, on 28nm, in 2016.I can't even begin to pretend to be enthusiastic about this.
The only people who will buy this are internet cafe/game centres in developing countries; none of whom care about AT says. I wonder why Ian thought he should spend so much time thoroughly reviewing a part that not one of AT's readers will ever buy.
Cryio - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
To be fair this is an architecture from 2015 brought to desktops half-hearted and it wasn't released for any good reason IMO.Given the improvements Kaveri and Carizzo pose over the previous generations most of the time, if AMD would have released FX CPUs based on Stream Roller and Excavator, we would've got some interesting CPUs.
kondor999 - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Oh look, another shitty, hot, antiquated AMD CPU that only (gosh, I can't actually think of anyone) would buy.I really wish they'd get their act together. Not necessarily because I'd buy their products, but just to force Intel into giving us more than a 3% (or so) IPC iterative improvement.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
So, if you only want AMD to be competitive so that intel is more competitive, how do you expect them to do that when nobody buys their stuff? R and D needs money.silverblue - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Though temperature readings appear to be a bit hard to come by, the 845 appears to idle at 26 degrees and full load on AIDA64 at 40 degrees which puts it below anything else AMD has, making it comparable to the Pentium G3220 (though the former does have a better cooling solution).Source: http://www.eteknix.com/amd-athlon-x4-845-carrizo-p...
It's up to you whether you want to believe that or not.
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
I don't think there's more than 3℅ IPC increase annually available. Apple, ARM, Qualcomm and Intel all seem to be converging at any given power.zodiacfml - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Waste of time. Yes, it competes with the Pentium, but the Intel chip has integrated graphics which could be useful whether the user has a graphics card or not. Paying more for less.Talking about Zen, it will just compete with Haswell generation chips. Intel knew this which is why their tick-tock strategy has slowed down.
cocochanel - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Intel didn't slow down because of AMD. It's because of x86. It's harder and harder even for mighty Intel engineers to squeeze more performance from an antiquated ISA. The fact that Zen took so long to get here it's a clear indication of the same.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
There is no clear indicationAMD has far fewer resources then intel does, so it makes sense it would take them much longer to make a new CPU arch then intel.
Intel isnt making any advancements because they have no competition. There may be more performance sitting in their arch they are not using, since there really is no reason to.
Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Carrizo totally gimped by l2 cache.The problem is that Bristol Ridge comes with the same pathetic 2MB for their 4 cores APU.