Marrying Vega and Zen: The AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review
by Ian Cutress on February 12, 2018 9:00 AM ESTConclusion: Raising the Bar for Integrated Graphics
The march on integrated graphics has come and gone in rapid spurts: the initial goal of providing a solution that provides enough performance for general office work has bifurcated into something that also aims gives a good gaming experience. Despite AMD and NVIDIA being the traditional gaming graphics companies, in this low-end space, it has required companies with x86 CPUs and compatible graphics IP to complete, meaning AMD and Intel. While going toe-to-toe for a number of years, with Intel dedicating over half of its silicon area to graphics at various points, the battle has become one-sided - Intel in the end only produced its higher performance solutions for specific customers willing to pay for it, while AMD marched up the performance by offering a lower cost solution as an alternative to discrete graphics cards that served little purpose beyond monitor output devices. This has come to a head, signifying a clear winner: AMD's graphics is the choice for an integrated solution, so much so that Intel is buying AMD's Vega silicon, a custom version, for its own mid-range integrated graphics. For AMD, that's a win. Now with the new Ryzen APUs, AMD has risen that low-end bar again.
If there was any doubt that AMD holds the integrated graphics crown, when we compare the new Ryzen APUs against Intel's latest graphics solutions, there is a clear winner. For almost all the 1080p benchmarks, the Ryzen APUs are 2-3x better in every metric. We can conclude that Intel has effectively given over this integrated graphics space to AMD at this point, deciding to focus on its encode/decode engines rather than raw gaming and 3D performance. With AMD having DDR4-2933 as the supported memory frequency on the APUs, assuming memory can be found for a reasonable price, it gaming performance at this price is nicely impressive.
When we compare the Ryzen 5 2400G with any CPU paired with the NVIDIA GT 1030, both solutions are within a few percent of each other in all of our 1080p benchmarks. The NVIDIA GT 1030 is a $90 graphics card, which when paired with a CPU, gets you two options: either match the combined price with the Ryzen 5 2400G, which leaves $80 for a CPU, giving a Pentium that loses in anything multi-threaded to AMD; or just increases the cost fo the system to get a CPU that is equivalent in performance. Except for chipset IO, the Intel + GT 1030 route offers no benefits over the AMD solution: it costs more, for a budget-constrained market, and draws more power overall. There's also the fact that the AMD APUs come with a Wraith Stealth 65W cooler, which adds additional value to the package that Intel doesn't seem to want to match.
For the compute benchmarks, Intel is still a clear winner with single threaded tests, with a higher IPC and higher turbo frequency. That is something that AMD might be able to catch up with on 12nm Zen+ coming later this year, which should offer a higher frequency, but Zen 2 is going to be the next chance to bridge this gap. If we compare the multi-threaded tests, AMD with 4C/8T and Intel 6C/6T seem to battle it out depending if a test can use multi-threading appropriately, but compared to Kaby Lake 4C/4T or 2C/4T offerings, AMD comes out ahead.
With the Ryzen 5 2400G, AMD has completely shut down the sub-$100 graphics card market. As a choice for gamers on a budget, those building systems in the region of $500, it becomes the processor to pick.
For the Ryzen 3 2200G, we want to spend more time analyzing the effect of a $99 quad-core APU the market, as well as looking how memory speed affects performance, especially with integrated graphics. There's also the angle of overclocking - with AMD showing a 20-25% frequency increase on the integrated graphics, we want to delve into how to unlock potential bottlenecks in a future article.
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haplo602 - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
Finally one review where I can see the driver version ... So this is the same driver used also for the Ryzen mobile APUs. Can you check if you can force/manual install the latest Adrenaline drivers ? That works on some of the Ryzen 2500u chips and actually increases the performance by some 15+% ...haplo602 - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
I hope there's a memory scaling article in the future with frequency and CL scaling for the APU part ...crotach - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
What about HTPC use?I was considering GT 1030 + Intel route for H265 and HDR10 playback and was really looking forward to Zen APUs, but there doesn't seem to be any motherboards with HDMI 2.0?!
Also, I wonder if the chips can be undervolted and underclocked to bring them to a near silent noise level for the living room.
Lolimaster - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
You can undervolt and underclock ANY intel or amd cpu.forgerone - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
What most writers and critics of integrated graphics processors such as AMD's APU or Intel iGP all seem to forget, is not EVERYONE in the world has a disposable or discretionary income equal to that of the United States, Europe, Japan etc. Not everyone can afford bleeding edge gaming PC's or laptops. Food, housing and clothing must come first for 80% of the population of the world.An APU can grant anyone who can afford at least a decent basic APU the enjoyment of playing most computer games. The visual quality of these games may not be up to the arrogantly high standards of most western gamers, but then again these same folks who are happy to have an APU also can not barely afford a 750p crt monitor much less a 4k flat screen.
This simple idea is huge not only for the laptop and pc market but especially game developers who can only expect to see an expansion of their Total Addressable Market. And that is good for everybody as broader markets help reduce the cost of development.
This in fact was the whole point behind AMD's release of Mantle and Microsoft and The Kronos Group's release of DX12 and Vulkan respectively.
Today's AMD APU has all of the power of a GPU Add In Board of not more than a several years back.
krazyfrog - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
Why did you leave out the 8400 and the 1500X in these comparisons?Kamgusta - Wednesday, February 14, 2018 - link
Because these CPUs, while having the same price range, outperform these Raven Ridge chips. That would have been a bad press for AMD and it seems like Anandtech wants to remains extremely loyal to AMD in these days.msroadkill612 - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
"the data shows both how far integrated graphics has come, and how far it still has to go to qualify for those 'immerse experiences' that Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA all claim are worth reaching for, with higher resolutions and higher fidelity. "This assumes a static situation which is rot.
what it reveals is that in the current paradigm, coders have coded accordingly for satisfactory results. If the paradigm changes and other ways work better, then code evolves.
This unprecedented integration of new gen, sibling cpu & gpu, offers many performance upsides too for future code.
picture a mobo with a discrete gpu like an equivalent 1030, then picture a ~matchbox footprint apu - there is a huge difference in the size of the respective circuits - yet they both do the same job & have to send a lot of data to each other.
it's not hard to figure which is inherently superior in many ways.
I strongly disagree with your blinkered bias.
Pork@III - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
There is something unfinished, something inconsolable.elites2012 - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
anything this chip lost to intel at, was most likely outdated. adobe, fcat, dolphin, pov are all outdated benchmarks.