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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ganeshts - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Yes, they can be used simutaneouslymikato - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link
Eyefinity!MrSpadge - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Seeing how the A10-something has 1.5 times the raw GPU horse power than the A8-something it seems obvious that the A10 is badly choked for memory bandwidth, even at DDR3-1866. Since even DDR3-2400 ist rather cheap these days it would be interesting to see performance scaling with memory speed. I expect the value the A10 provides can be considerably increased.rscoot - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Wondering if the IMC is rated for DDR3-2400 though. And yeah it's patently obvious that the APU on these chips are starved for memory bandwidth.wwwcd - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Intel HD 4000, looks like a wrist of gay, against the presentation of graphics controllers set in Trinity ;)formulav8 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
This preview showed me how pathetic Intels junk is. Doesn't even come close overall.Aone - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Would you say what cpu you used for GT 640?wheeqo - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
AMD please take Trinity to Windows 8 Tablet!Roland00Address - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
but is it possible for you to add these three cards before the final review next week1) 6670 1gb gddr5
2) 6570 ddr3 or 6670 ddr3
3) 7750 1gb gddr5
I ask for these are new cards that trinity will be competing against in a similar price bracket. You can't find a 5570 on neweeg right now since it has been discontinued and replaced with 6000 and 7000 series part. The only 5570 on newegg right now is a proprietary one from visiontek with a custom output that has a dongle that allows it to do 4 monitors in a low profile slot.
Thank You
herrdoktor330 - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
To add on to this one, can you test the APU with those cards IN CROSSFIRE?I seriously think that you could get decent enough HD gaming from this setup with some eye candy with a little help from a discrete GPU. I've been waiting on this platform for a while and, while the CPU performance will be similar to the mobile variant (thus underwhelming), this APU is going to be awesome for the HTPC that's also gaming capable.