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 ESTGrand Theft Auto V at 3 GHz
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise finally hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark, relying only on the final part which combines a flight scene along with an in-city drive-by followed by a tanker explosion. We record both the average frame rate and the percentage of frames under 60 FPS (16.6ms).
For this test we used the following settings with our graphics cards:
| Grand Theft Auto Settings | |||
| Resolution | Quality | ||
| Low GPU | Integrated Graphics | 1280x720 | Lowest |
| ASUS R7 240 1GB DDR3 | |||
| Medium GPU | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB | 1920x1080 | Very High |
| MSI R9 285 Gaming 2G | |||
| High GPU | ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB | 1920x1080 | Very High |
| MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G | |||
If we look purely at the average frame rates first, the same pattern as the other tests shows here. Carrizo sits between Kaveri and Trinity, anywhere from 3-7% behind Kaveri.
![Grand Theft Auto V on ASUS R7 240 DDR3 2GB ($70) [Under 60 FPS]](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10436/82553.png)
![Grand Theft Auto V on MSI R9 285 Gaming 2GB ($240) [Under 60 FPS]](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10436/82561.png)
![Grand Theft Auto V on MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB ($245) [Under 60 FPS]](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10436/82571.png)
![Grand Theft Auto V on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560) [Under 60 FPS]](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10436/82591.png)
If we compare the time spent under 60 FPS, again Kaveri takes the lead over Carrizo. The low end GPU is interesting, showing a good trend towards the newer microarchitectures, but still in favor of Kaveri with 4 MB of L2 cache over Carrizo with 2 MB of L2.
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owan - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
A nice little pop over the previous generation and its still woeful compared to its direct competition from intel. I wonder why AMD even bothered with this product, Intel has a complete stranglehold on the mobile market and AMD's design wins are few and far between. Surely some of the architectural changes could have been rolled into a replacement for their incredibly stale AM3+ products, which have by now become completely irrelevant. I mean, we all know Zen is coming (and I hope its good) but something in the meantime would probably have done more for their mind share than a mobile part.AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
"I wonder why AMD even bothered with this product"Yeah, pretty much what I've been thinking with AMD's CPU launches for a while now. *Surely* they can't be making money on their CPUs compared to how much they spend on researching, testing, producing and then marketing them?
(Unless there's a market that's low-profile in the media but is lucrative for AMD - perhaps the low budget market in Asia?)
patel21 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I'm from Asia, India. And here too people are smart enough to ignore AMD even in really low budget systems. And really we still have a complete PC with P4 or C2D easily available around 100$jospoortvliet - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Compared to a p4 these amd cpu's are amazing... remember that in the time of the P4, amd made the faster more power efficient cpu's.mr_tawan - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
P4 or C2D are worse than every current AMD cpus on the market .... in one or another aspect.BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
It is called "progress". Both Intel Pentium4 and Intel Core 2 Duo are already out of production years ago. Also it was Intel's Core 2 Duo that blew away AMD back into the stone age a decade ago, and since then AMD has never recovered. AMD's QuadFather FX and Barcelona (especially the TLB bugged ones) are the worst CPUs of their era (quite often was much slower than previous generation overall).bananaforscale - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
P4? Ew. :P (I have a P4D in the other room, it's not really preferable to anything. That if anything is a dead end.)nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
AMD is good in laptops. It will be better when Zen is out. Zen on the desktop may be good depending on the benchmarks and price.mr_tawan - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
I'm from Asia, Thailand. AFAIK AMD is pretty popular among internet cafe' (or should I say... game center instead ?).BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Over here, hardly see AMD being used in internet cafes.