AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 1
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 27, 2012 12:00 AM ESTMinecraft
Switching gears for the moment we have Minecraft, our OpenGL title. It's no secret that OpenGL usage on the PC has fallen by the wayside in recent years, and as far major games go Minecraft is one of but a few recently released major titles using OpenGL. Minecraft is incredibly simple—not even utilizing pixel shaders let alone more advanced hardware—but this doesn't mean it's easy to render. Its use of massive amounts of blocks (and the overdraw that creates) means you need solid hardware and an efficient OpenGL implementation if you want to hit playable framerates with a far render distance. Consequently, as the most successful OpenGL game in quite some number of years (at over 7.5mil copies sold), it's a good reminder for GPU manufacturers that OpenGL is not to be ignored.
Minecraft does incredibly well on Trinity. While the improvement over Llano is only 15%, the advantage over Ivy Bridge is tremendous.
Civilization V
Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression. There are other games that are more stressful overall, but this is likely the game most stressing of DX11 performance in particular.
Civilization V shows some of the mildest gains in all of our tests vs. Llano. The 5800K/7660D manage to outperform Llano by only 8 -11% depending on the test. The advantage over Intel is huge of course.
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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.