AMD Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G Core Frequency Scaling: An Analysis

Discrete Graphics Performance

As stated on the first page, here we take both APUs from 3.5 GHz to 4.0 GHz in 100 MHz increments and run our testing suite at each stage. This is a 14.3% increase in clock speed, however when it comes to gaming it can be unpredictable where those gains are going to come from. 

For our gaming tests, we are only concerned with real-world resolutions and settings for these games. It would be fairly easy to adjust the settings in each game to a CPU limited scenario, however the results from such a test are mostly pointless and non-transferable to the real world in our view. Scaling takes many forms, based on GPU, resolution, detail levels, and settings, so we want to make sure the results correlate to what users will see day-to-day.

Civilization 6

First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.

Despite not showing any great scaling for integrated graphics, the minute we bump up to our discrete GPU we can see that Civilization gets a good bump from frequency scaling. The average frame rates climb up +7.0% for the 2400G and +9.7% for the 2200G. Percentile numbers seem to vary on the 2400G, but the 2200G gets a distinct +10.6% gain.

Ashes of the Singularity (DX12)

Seen as the holy child of DX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go and explore as many of the DX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.

AoTS is again a little over the place: technically there's an 8% gain in frame rates for the 2400G, however the 2200G seems to fluctuate a bit more. The better performance on the 2200G seems a bit startling too: technically with only four threads, each thread has more memory bandwidth and more core resources per thread than having eight threads together. This might improve certain latencies in the instruction list, although it is surprising so see such a big change.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider (DX12)

One of the newest games in the gaming benchmark suite is Rise of the Tomb Raider (RoTR), developed by Crystal Dynamics, and the sequel to the popular Tomb Raider which was loved for its automated benchmark mode. But don’t let that fool you: the benchmark mode in RoTR is very much different this time around.

Visually, the previous Tomb Raider pushed realism to the limits with features such as TressFX, and the new RoTR goes one stage further when it comes to graphics fidelity. This leads to an interesting set of requirements in hardware: some sections of the game are typically GPU limited, whereas others with a lot of long-range physics can be CPU limited, depending on how the driver can translate the DirectX 12 workload.

RoTR sees a small +3% gain in average frame rates going up to 4.0 GHz, however the percentiles get the biggest boost, showing +17.9% on the 2400G.