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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mrdude - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Fantastic work, Ian. Now if AMD put half as much work into their uArchs as you did into reviewing them, we might finally get somewhere =PGeranium - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Ian,Exynos 7420 and Apple A9 is built on Samsang's 14nm LPE. Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 820 is built on 14nm LPP.
Vlad_Da_Great - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
AMD CPU R&D has been outsourced pretty much close to an 1 year ago. Even Jim Keller left before anything(silicon) was remotely close to be released. AMD has submitted on the CPU front, and now with the another failure from the RX 480 power fiasco it seems in the GPU segment too. ZEN is just a myth for the small minded amoebas. The closest they can come to is Haswell, even in some benchmarks they will be far behind.Intel has reported times in many improvement over the 4/5y spam CPU's. AMD can barely get 30% and in some synthetic benchmarks they are below something was produced/developed half a decade ago.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
You have sources for your ludicrous claims?wumpus - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Zen tapped out. Thus the drawdown. But if you think Zen will compare as well to Intel silicon as the 480 does to the 1060, remember that Intel is still hand-laying out the transistors and AMD is using autorouters.Hopefully AMD will at least be able to get back to producing "the cheap stuff', but that is their best hope. They've pretty much surrendered.
Calculatron - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Great article, overall! I am glad to see someone finally review the product.I was hoping, however, that you would come across this strange "throttling" issue that this CPU seems to have while playing certain games (not all games, just certain ones). Some people have started threads on Tom's Hardware, and I started one on AMD's own forums:
https://community.amd.com/thread/198618
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3054721/ath...
DominionSeraph - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Yeesh, the barest overclock physically degrades the processor? This likely means it's degrading at stock as they've pushed a 35W part to 65W and beyond.Sherlock - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
/rantWho's your web-designer Anandtech - seriously - I see a big banner at the top & two big ads on the left & right of the page. I am so pissed by the design - I actually calculated the pixel count - only 24% of the screen is dedicated to content - excluding the large Anandtech logo & the menu bars - 10% for the screen is content - please don't kill the site with such crap
rant/
Also - "For clarity, hand was from AMD but not Lisa Su's" :)
DominionSeraph - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
A narrow column is more readable. Who cares what's on the sides?The_Assimilator - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Ad blockers are your friend.