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 ESTAlien: Isolation at 3 GHz
If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled. We take the average frame rate as our marker with a scripted version of the built-in benchmark.
For this test we used the following settings with our graphics cards:
| Alien Isolation Settings | |||
| Resolution | Quality | ||
| Low GPU | Integrated Graphics | 1280x720 | Ultra |
| 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 | Ultra |
| MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G | |||
Unfortunately, Alien Isolation pushed a significant update for low-end AMD cards (like the R7 240) near the end of our benchmark suite, meaning that the 18 months of data with the card are now in the trash. Nevertheless, the rest of the results from our other cards show that Carrizo is comprehensively out performed by Kaveri in every test. It's worth remembering that the Carrizo part only has PCIe 3.0 x8 available, but the difference is mostly likely to do with data transfer through the L2 caches.
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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.