AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 1
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 27, 2012 12:00 AM ESTDiRT 3
DiRT 3 is our next DX11 game. Developer Codemasters Southam added DX11 functionality to their EGO 2.0 engine back in 2009 with DiRT 2, and while it doesn't make extensive use of DX11 it does use it to good effect in order to apply tessellation to certain environmental models along with utilizing a better ambient occlusion lighting model. As a result DX11 functionality is very cheap from a performance standpoint, meaning it doesn't require a GPU that excels at DX11 feature performance.
DiRT 3 shows a relatively small performance advantage compared to Llano - only about 12 - 15% when comparing the two top end parts. More exciting from AMD's perspective is that it can deliver performance similar to the 3870K's 400-core GPU with the 256-core GPU in the A8-5600K.
The advantage over Intel's HD 4000/2500 remains significant.
Total War: Shogun 2
Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. Adding to the load is the use of DX11 features such as tessellation and high definition ambient occlusion, which means it can give any GPU a run for its money.
We see similar scaling to DiRT 3 in Shogun: about a 15% improvement over Llano, or flat performance if you compare to the 2nd fastest Trinity GPU configuration.
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DanNeely - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Does AMD share chipsets between their desktop and mobile platforms? AMD's done this for years (all of their desktop chipsets?); and all the legacy embedded devices you listed are typically connected via the LPC (low pin count) bus, a semi-parallelized implementation of the '80's era 8 bit ISA bus.jamyryals - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I liked the sneak peak. I don't care if amd wants to hold off on the CPU benchmarks, they'll be out shortly anyways. It was already hinted at as what to expect by Anand in the article. The only thing that's troublesome is the people who take this as an opportunity to besmirch someone's credibility. Take a deep breath and in a few days you'll be able to justify your own viewpoint no matter what the numbers say anyways.At this point, it's more about the direction amd is headed that is interesting than this product. What is the target goal for this family of chips and will that be more successful than competing head to head with Intel.
Torrijos - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
In august an interesting article, treating of the influence of CPU was posted :http://techreport.com/review/23246/inside-the-seco...
The idea was not to measure average FPS, but instead to measure millisecond/frame for all the frames in a benchmark in order to see if performances were constant or would fall harshly for some frames (having a clear impact on playability).
The thing is with the current waive of CPUs with iGPUs it might be time to switch benchmarks to a similar methodology, in order to see which architectures handle the memory work better.
taltamir - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I just did a double take, had to look twice, and indeed this is 100% a GPU benchmark with not a single test about the CPU.The only test relevant to the CPU might have been the AES acceleration (a fixed function test) and the power test (where intel still spanks AMD).
Jamahl - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
This is what happens when you look at the graphs without actually reading anything.Torrijos - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I read the fact that they can't talk about CPU now, I was trying to say that FPS is an antiquated metric...My point was that APUs tend to share memory bandwidth between the CPU and GPU resulting in unreliable peak performances (even when coupled with a discreet GPU) while still maintaining a good average FPS.
In the end the FPS metric isn't the best available number to clearly evaluate performance of these chips. a full plot of milliseconds per frame for the entire test run offers a clearer vision.
An alternante measure would be % of frames that took more than XX milliseconds to generate.
James5mith - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I know that the Desktop CPU has had more and more integration, but when did Anandtech decide to start calling them SoC's, as if they were the all-in-one packages inside a smartphone?It's still an APU, or CPU+GPU+IMC, or whatever you want to call it. It is not a complete system. It still needs a southbridge chipset for all the sundry interconnects.
SleepyFE - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Will everyone please give up on the measuring competitions (referring to mine is bigger). I'm using Phenom 2 x2 555 and it works just fine 3 years running. I'm an average price conscious gamer. I look for 100€ CPU's and 150€ GPU's (right now i have 6870 Radeon). Everything i do works just fine with very high 2xAA settings. Having an i7 would make no difference in performance because games don't put more cores to good use and every other program i use can't even put a single core to good use.I will say again:"I AM AVERAGE!!" And it all works for me. ALL the CPU's right now are sufficient for the average man (or woman).
The reason AMD is stressing the GPU side of APU's is because that's what matters. When you can buy an APU for 200€ that has a HD Radeon x870 (x being the generation number) class GPU in it that saves me money and cancels one very loud fan. It's a win win.
jwcalla - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
"Average" people don't need a GPU any more powerful than what you'd need to drive a simple display. Because "average" people are nowhere near interested in PC gaming.And this is why AMD's strategy is a little silly.
The key to marketshare is making sweet deals with Dell, HP, etc.
jaydee - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I noticed the motherboard has 3 digital video outputs and VGA. Can all three (DVI, HDMI, DP) be used at the same time with the APU?