AMD Ryzen 9 5980HS Cezanne Review: Ryzen 5000 Mobile Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 26, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Vega
- Ryzen
- Zen 3
- Renoir
- Notebook
- Ryzen 9 5980HS
- Ryzen 5000 Mobile
- Cezanne
IGP: 720p Gaming Tests
Testing our Cezanne sample for integrated graphics is a double-edged sword – AMD fully expects this CPU to be paired with a discrete solution in almost all notebook environments, whereas mini-PC designs might be a mix of integrated and discrete. The integrated graphics on this silicon is more geared towards the U-series processors at 15 W, and so that is where the optimizations lie. We encountered a similar environment when we tested Renoir at 35 W last year as well.
In order to enable the integrated graphics on our ASUS ROG Flex X13 system, we disable the GTX 1650 through the device manager. This forces the system to run on the Vega 8 graphics inside, which for this processor runs at 2100 MHz, a +350 MHz jump from the previous generation based on the improved power management and minor manufacturing improvements. We did the same to the other systems in our test suite.
Integrated graphics over the years has been built up from something barely useable in a 2D desktop environment to hardware that can competitively run the most popular eSports titles at good resolutions, medium settings, at playable framerates. In our recent review of AMD’s Ryzen 4000G Desktop APUs, we noted that these were the best desktop APUs that money could buy, held back at this point mostly by the memory bandwidth, but still enabling some good performance. Ultimately modern day integrated graphics has cannibalized the sub-$100 GPU market, and these sorts of processors work great in budget builds. There’s still a way to go on performance, and at least mobile processors help in that regard as more systems push to LPDDR4X memory systems that afford better memory bandwidth.
For our integrated graphics testing, we’re using our lowest configuration for our game comparisons. This typically means the lowest resolution and graphics fidelity settings we can get away with, which to be honest is still a lot better visually than when I used to play Counter Strike 1.5 with my dual core netbook in the late 2000s. From there the goal is to showcase some good graphics performance tied in with CPU performance to see where the limits are – even at 720p on Low settings, some of these processors are still graphics limited.
| Integrated Graphics Benchmark Results | |||||
| AnandTech | Ryzen 9 5980HS |
Ryzen 9 4900HS |
Ryzen 7 4800U |
Core i7 1185G7 |
|
| Power Mode | 35 W | 35 W | 15 W | 28-35 W | |
| Graphics | Vega 8 | Vega 8 | Vega 8 | Iris Xe | |
| Memory | LP4-4267 | D4-3200 | LP4-4267 | LP4-4267 | |
| Frames Per Second Averages | |||||
| Civilization 6 | 480p Min | 101.7 | 98.9 | 68.4 | 66.2 |
| Deus Ex: MD | 600p Min | 80.7 | 76.5 | 61.2 | 69.1 |
| Final Fantasy XV | 720p Med | 31.4 | 31.3 | 29.1 | 36.5 |
| Strange Brigade | 720p Low | 93.2 | 85.2 | 75.7 | 89.3 |
| Borderlands 3 | 360p VLow | 89.8 | 93.6 | - | 64.9 |
| Far Cry 5 | 360p Low | 68.0 | 69.5 | 60.0 | 61.3 |
| GTA 5 | 720p Low | 98.9 | 80.7 | 80.0 | 81.9 |
| Gears Tactics | 720p Low | 86.8 | - | 87.8 | 118.2 |
| 95th Frame Time Percentiles (shown as FPS) | |||||
| Civilization 6 | 480p Min | 69.0 | 67.4 | 45.7 | 43.8 |
| Deus Ex: MD | 600p Min | 45.6 | 57.3 | 38.1 | 44.1 |
| Final Fantasy XV | 720p Med | - | 26.6 | 24.6 | 26.5 |
| Strange Brigade | 768p Min | 84.2 | 77.0 | 68.6 | 73.0 |
| Borderlands 3 | 360p VLow | 63.6 | 73.8 | - | 48.9 |
| Far Cry 5 | 360p Low | 50.3 | 62.3 | 43.8 | 49.8 |
| GTA 5 | 720p Low | 66.8 | 52.8 | 56.0 | 55.7 |
| Gears Tactics | 720p Low | 67.5 | - | 78.3 | 104.5 |
Despite the Ryzen 9 5980HS having LPDDR4X memory and extra frequency, the performance uplift against the Ryzen 9 4900HS is relatively mediocre – a few FPS at best, or losing a few FPS at worst. This is except for GTA, where the uplift is more ~20%, with the Zen 3 cores helping most here. In most tests it’s an easy win against Intel’s top Xe solution, except in Gears Tactics, which sides very heavily with the Intel solution.
With all that being said, as mentioned, the Ryzen 9 parts here are more likely to be paired with discrete graphics solutions. The ASUS ROG Flow X13 we are using today has a GTX 1650, whereas the ASUS Zephyrus G14 with the 4900HS has an RTX 2060. These scenarios are what really dictate the cooling solution in these systems, as well as how they are both used in workloads that requires CPU and GPU performance.
For any users confused as to why we run at these settings; these are our low 'IGP'-class settings in our CPU Gaming test format. As mentioned in our new CPU Suite article in the middle of last year, our CPU Gaming tests have four sets of settings: 720p Low (or Lower), 1440p Low, 4K Low, and 1080p Maximum. The segment above our lowest this in our suite is 1440p, which for a lot of these integrated GPUs would put numbers into the low double digits, if not lower, which something we've done in the past to massive complaints about why even bothering with such low framerate numbers. The point here is to work from a maximum frame rate, see if the game is even playable to begin with, and then detect where in a game the bottleneck can be; in some of these tests we're still dealing with GPU/DRAM bottlenecks. I've played CSS1.5 and other games at a Lan party on dual core AMD netbooks in the late 2000s, having to use low resolution texture packs to get it even 20 FPS playable. I still had masses amount of fun. From these numbers you can see the best possible frame rates for a given title and engine, and work down from there. It provides a starting point for further directions. These processors more often being paired with discrete solutions anyway, making discussions about IGP performance almost somewhat trivial compared to the rest of the data/
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Ptosio - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
ARM is not some magic silver bullet - MediaTech has vast experience with ARM but are their chromebook chips any way close to Apple M1? (or Zen3 for that matter?)And remember AMD is yet to get acess to the same TSMC process as Apple - maybe once they're on par, large part of that efficiency advantage dissapears?
ABR - Wednesday, January 27, 2021 - link
AMD has K12, which Jim Keller also worked on, waiting in the wings. Most assuredly they have continued developing it. Whether it will play in the same league with M1 remains to be seen, but they also have the graphics IP to go with it so they could likely come out with a strong offering if it comes to that. Not sure what Intel will do..Deicidium369 - Wednesday, January 27, 2021 - link
ancient design, far exceeded by even 10 year old ARM designs.Spunjji - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
You say some really silly thingsSpunjji - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
"Apple will outclass everything x86 once they introduce their second gen silicon with much higher core count and other architectural improvements."I'll believe it when I see it. Their first move was far better than expected, but it doesn't come close to justifying the claims you're making here.
Glaurung - Saturday, January 30, 2021 - link
M1 is Apple's replacement for ultra-low power, nominal 15w Intel chips. Later this year we will see their replacement for higher powered (35-65w) Intel chips. Nobody knows what those chips will be like yet, but it's pretty obvious they'll have 8 or 16 performance cores instead of just 4, with a similar scale up of the number of GPU cores. They'll add the ability to handle more than 16gb and two ports, and they will put it in their high end laptops and imac desktops. Potentially also on the menu would be a faster peak clock rate. That's not an "I'll believe it when I see it," that's a foregone conclusion. Also a foregone conclusion: next year they will have an even faster core with even better IPC to put in their phones, tablets, and computers.As of last year, Apple's chips had far better IPC and performance per watt than anything Intel or AMD could make, and they only fell short on overall performance due to only having 4 performance cores in their ultra-low power chips.
(For the record, I use Windows. But there's no denying that Apple is utterly dominating in the contest to see who can make the fastest CPUs)
GeoffreyA - Sunday, January 31, 2021 - link
Apple will release faster cores but so will AMD. And now that they've got an idea of what Apple's design is capable of, I'm pretty sure they could overtake it, if they wanted to.GeoffreyA - Sunday, January 31, 2021 - link
As much as I hate to say it, the M1 could be analogous to Core and K8 in the Netburst era. The return to lower clock speeds, higher IPC, and wider execution. Having Skylake and Sunny C. as their measure, AMD produced so and so (and brilliant stuff too, Zen 3 is). Perhaps the M1 will recalibrate the perf/watt measure, like Conroe did, like the Athlon 64 did.I've got a feeling, too, that ARM isn't playing the role in the M1 that people are thinking. It's possible the difference in perf/watt between Zen 3 and M1 is due not to x86 vs. ARM but rather the astonishing width of that core, as well as caches. How much juice ARM is adding, I doubt whether we can say, unless the other components were similar. My belief, it isn't adding much.
Farfolomew - Thursday, February 4, 2021 - link
Very nice comment, and this little thread is a really fascinating read. I've not thought of the comparisons of the P4 -> Core2Duo Mhz regression, but I really think you're on to something here. The thing is, this isn't anything new with M1, Apple has been doing it since the A9 back in 2015, when it finally had IPC parity with the Core M chips. The M1 is just the evolution and scaling up to that of an equivalent TDP laptop chip that Intel has been producing.So the question, then, is, if it's not the "ARM" architecture giving the huge advantages, why haven't we seen a radical shift in the x86 technology back to ultra wide cores, and caches? Or maybe we are, incrementally, with Ice/Tiger Lake, and Zen 2/3/4?
Very fascinating times!
GeoffreyA - Sunday, February 7, 2021 - link
"Or maybe we are, incrementally, with Ice/Tiger Lake, and Zen 2/3/4?"I think that sums it up. As to why their scaling is going at a slower rate, there are a few possible explanations. Likely, truth is somewhere in between.
Firstly, AMD and Intel have aimed for high-frequency designs, which is at loggerheads with widening of a core. Then, AMD has been targeting Haswell (and later) perf/watt with Zen. When one's measure is such, one won't go much beyond that (Zen 2 and 3 did, but there's still juice in the tank). Lastly, it could be owing to the main bottleneck in x86: the variable-length instructions, which make parallel decoding difficult. Adding more decoders helps but causes power to go up. So the front end could be limiting how much we can widen our resources down the line.
Having said that, I still think that AMD's ~15% IPC increase each year has been impressive. "The stuff of legend." Intel, back when it was leading, had us believe such gains were impossible. It's going to be some interesting years ahead, watching the directions Intel, Apple, and AMD take. I'm confident AMD will keep up the good work.