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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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
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