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AMD Kaveri Benchmarked: BETTER THAN i5 Haswell w/out GPU and NEARLY EQUAL with one!

FLAguy954

Junior Member
Sources: PurePC.pl via WCCFTECH

Finally AMD is playing some real catch-up with Intel CPUs in regards to gaming. Here are some slides (along with some extra info on Mantle):

Integrated graphics performance:
Kaveri-Gaming-Performance.jpg


Haswell i5 4670K vs Kaveri A10-7850K with a dedicated GPU (R9-270X):
A10-7850K-vs-Core-i5-4670K1.jpg


HIGH-END Haswell i7 vs LOW-END Kaveri with Mantle:
AMD-Kaveri-With-Mantle1.jpg


Performance per watt vs Richland:
Kaveri-APU-PCMark-8-Performance.jpg


Data pointer performance:
Kaveri-APU-HSA-performance1.jpg


Mantle in comparison to DirectX:
AMD-Mantle-vs-DirectX-Performance.jpeg


Mantle in comparison to DirectX with Kaveri low-end:
Mantle-vs-DirectX.jpg


Synthetic Benchmarks:
AMD-A10-7850K-Performance.jpg


General 1080p gaming on Kaveri:
Kaveri-APU-Gaming-Performance.jpg
 

chadskin

Member
You're still better off with a cheap Intel CPU and a mid-class GPU, imho. Only thing the APU will allow you is a smaller casing.
 
Really wish they'd pick up and improve their CPU performance, as it stands the mid to high end leaves one with no choice but to use Intel. I want more competition in that space.

APUs still aren't at a performance level where most gamers will forgo a discrete GPU.
 

DrPreston

Member
Stop trying to make integrated GPU's for PC gaming happen. They're not going to happen. 40fps on low settings in Tomb Raider is barely playable.
 
Stop trying to make integrated GPU's for PC gaming happen. They're not going to happen. 40fps on low settings in Tomb Raider is barely playable.

iGPU are getting better and AMD APUs are good for gaming with decent settings. I believe these recent versions will allow for at least 1080p30 on medium. That's equal to console settings which also have APUs in them
 

Pixels

Member
This is awesome but I wish they'd make an APU that is for high end like on par with i7 and with a 290X lol. Hopefully that's the future.
 

SparkTR

Member
Stop trying to make integrated GPU's for PC gaming happen. They're not going to happen. 40fps on low settings in Tomb Raider is barely playable.

If they bring up the low-end then more power to them. PC gaming isn't just being held back by consoles, it's being held back by underpowered computers.
 

pants

Member
Looking forward to this, I miss when there was a choice between AMD and Intel, these days it's been all Intel.
 

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
Sources: PurePC.pl via WCCFTECH

Finally AMD is playing some real catch-up with Intel CPUs in regards to gaming. Here are some slides (along with some extra info on Mantle):

Haswell i5 4670K vs Kaveri A10-7850K with a dedicated GPU (R9-270X):
A10-7850K-vs-Core-i5-4670K1.jpg
That's the only slide that matters to me. If that trickles down AMD could be in a very nice spot. Hopefully benches come out soon so the budget builds can really shine with a nice cheap CPU to OC again.
IPC up and TDP down? Sounds good. Prices as stated below also seem low so there hopefully can be some real nice PCs for $500-$600 again.

Tom's also has this slide:
gPBilpn.jpg


and WCCF has this older info:
PFmUTc1.png
 

xJavonta

Banned
Stop trying to make integrated GPU's for PC gaming happen. They're not going to happen. 40fps on low settings in Tomb Raider is barely playable.
That's more than playable for people that aren't accustomed to traditional high end PC gaming.

iGPUs are getting there.
 

HariKari

Member
Stop trying to make integrated GPU's for PC gaming happen. They're not going to happen. 40fps on low settings in Tomb Raider is barely playable.

A large portion of Steam users play on integrated graphics or something close to it. From the AMD presentation, I believe it was something like 35% as of the November hardware survey have a relatively weak card. The average Steam gaming device is probably a college laptop, as previously mentioned, and not a 3 GPU monstrosity.

I will never personally buy one of these solely for the GPU, but I'm all ears if it helps boost Crossfire scaling or adds 10-20 FPS to a game in dual graphics mode with a discrete GPU.
 

SparkTR

Member
That makes no sense. PCs is all about variety. Not everybody can afford the top end graphics cards or CPUs. options like this help consumers.

I'm talking about games that push hardware, developers are less likely to take risks like that when so much of the market is on low-end computers. I'm saying this is a good thing. According to Epic more innovation in the low end will help the high end, but instead of bargaining with a brick wall (aka Intel) like Epic attempted, hopefully AMD and these things will do the innovating and push hardware in that market segment.
 
Really wish they'd pick up and improve their CPU performance, as it stands the mid to high end leaves one with no choice but to use Intel. I want more competition in that space.

APUs still aren't at a performance level where most gamers will forgo a discrete GPU.

I'd argue that AMD has done more to improve their CPU performance over the last couple of years than Intel has. The problem is that they started from well behind where Intel was so they have narrowed, but not closed the gap. We'll see what the actual numbers wind up being, but they're claiming 20% IPC increase in single-threaded workloads for Steamroller. If that is correct it's a bigger jump than Intel has seen in years.

Where this really looks like it's bringing the biggest improvements though is in lower TDP parts (15-45W). That is where AMD has been headed for awhile and frankly it's where they need to be headed, however much I'd love to see a world-beater from them on the desktop.

At least we're seeing the continuation of the push for good IGP performance that they started with the 780G chipset. People forget just how crappy Intel IGP was until AMD pushed them.
 
They keep improving massively. Anything with an AMD APU in it is going to play most modern games playable on low settings. This simply wasn't happening for laptops without dedicated GPUs until recently.

The better this situation gets, the better PC gaming as a whole will be. I don't see how every college kid's laptop being able to play new games on reasonable settings is a bad thing.

Well, they keep improving over the years because they keep increasing the amount of silicon of the chip dedicated to the gpu. Kaveri is almost 50% of the cpu, said by AMD itself!

I hate that, because if you happen to use a dedicated GPU, it means half the cpu you bought it's useless.
 

chadskin

Member
They keep improving massively. Anything with an AMD APU in it is going to play most modern games playable on low settings. This simply wasn't happening for laptops without dedicated GPUs until recently.

They keep improving, yes. Some of those improvements are masked by the slowed down progress of graphical fidelity in games though, in large part thanks to the long old gen of consoles.

With the new consoles now in store, progress will pick up again and these APUs will in all probability have issues to render games in 720p on low settings in two, three years time. It's only going to get worse for these APUs, in contrast the new consoles haven't even scratched the surface of their power.
 

FLAguy954

Junior Member
That's the only slide that matters to me. If that trickles down AMD could be in a very nice spot. Hopefully benches come out soon so the budget builds can really shine with a nice cheap CPU to OC again.
IPC up and TDP down? Sounds good. Prices as stated below also seem low so there hopefully can be some real nice PCs for $500-$600 again.

Tom's also has this slide:
gPBilpn.jpg


and WCCF has this older info:
PFmUTc1.png

I was just about to PM you about this info lol.
 
Well, they keep improving over the years because they keep increasing the amount of silicon of the chip dedicated to the gpu. Kaveri is almost 50% of the cpu, said by AMD itself!

I hate that, because if you happen to use a dedicated GPU, it means half the cpu you bought it's useless.

IIRC the Richland parts were the same, give of take 5%. It certainly wasn't less than 40% dedicated to the IGP. The main thing difference here is that they're using GCN instead of VLIW4.
 

xenist

Member
This is great. The low end getting taken care of properly is about the best thing that can happen to PC gaming.
 
They're AMD APUs with dedicated graphics, right? I don't think we're going to see the low end rot away as this generation progresses, quite the opposite in fact.

No dedicated GPU in either of them, they just have a lot more graphical grunt than any desktop APU to date and a lot more memory bandwidth to match.
 

chadskin

Member
They're AMD APUs with dedicated graphics, right? I don't think we're going to see the low end rot away as this generation progresses, quite the opposite in fact.

Architecturally, there are huge differences between the AMD Kaveri APUs and the custom APUs found in the new consoles, let alone the benefits of a fixed hardware which allows game devs to code to the metal, without having to go through DirectX and an OS.

If the APUs struggle with old-gen games like Tomb Raider, BioShock Infinite or BF4 on 1080p and low to medium settings, I don't think it's farfetched to say those struggles will grow exponentially once "true" new-gen games hit the market this/next year.
 
Architecturally, there are huge differences between the AMD Kaveri APUs and the custom APUs found in the new consoles, let alone the benefits of a fixed hardware which allows game devs to code to the metal, without having to go through DirectX and an OS.

If the APUs struggle with old-gen games like Tomb Raider, BioShock Infinite or BF4 on 1080p and low to medium settings, I don't think it's farfetched to say those struggles will grow exponentially once "true" new-gen games hit the market this/next year.

I agree, but only due to memory bandwidth issues. Neither console has extremely powerful hardware, even if the PS4 is pretty decent.

DDR3 will hold Kaveri back a ton though, especially given how often OEMs use a single DIMM or DDR3 1600 (or both).
 
Stop trying to make integrated GPU's for PC gaming happen. They're not going to happen. 40fps on low settings in Tomb Raider is barely playable.

My 2013 MacBook Air with its integrated graphics plays modern games at playable framerates with low settings. It's not a system to get for playing games but I can damn well play games on it in a pinch. It's only going to get better from here; integrated graphics are forming a baseline that going to give all PCs a reasonable ability to run prettier games.
 

sleepykyo

Member
Stop trying to make integrated GPU's for PC gaming happen. They're not going to happen. 40fps on low settings in Tomb Raider is barely playable.

That's 10 frames more than consoles' target frame rate. Anyway the better the low end, be it consoles or integrated graphics cards the less constrained developers are.
 
That's really impressive, imagine if AMD release a high end APU(priced at $500) that has the same performance as a gaming PC with core i7 and GTX780.
 

Zarx

Member
I agree, but only due to memory bandwidth issues. Neither console has extremely powerful hardware, even if the PS4 is pretty decent.

DDR3 will hold Kaveri back a ton though, especially given how often OEMs use a single DIMM or DDR3 1600 (or both).

Yea DDR4 will be huge for APUs, also they should probably look into doing something like the large eDRAM cache that Intel use on the Iris parts for their high end APUs. Memory bandwidth is a big bottleneck. I would also be interested to see what they could do if they released a big APU like the 5b transistor chip in the XBOne aimed at the Steammachine market, tho that would require a new socket I think they could carve out a niche in the HTPC/Steammachine space with a big powerful APU pared with DDR4 and a large on die cache.
 

Durante

Member
I'd take that CPU-only (that is, CPU+dedicated graphics) comparison with a large grain of salt. Sure, I can buy that their integrated graphics outperform Intel, but I guess the benchmarks with a GPU use settings designed to be pretty GPU limited in order to minimize CPU performance differences.

That's really impressive, imagine if AMD release a high end APU(priced at $500) that has the same performance as a gaming PC with core i7 and GTX780.
AMD can't even build a CPU-only chip which equals i7 performance, so that seems more than a little far fetched.
 

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
I'd take that CPU-only (that is, CPU+dedicated graphics) comparison with a large grain of salt. Sure, I can buy that their integrated graphics outperform Intel, but I guess the benchmarks with a GPU use settings designed to be pretty GPU limited in order to minimize CPU performance differences.
True, but TDP is down and they were looking for ~25% IPC gain so............... hopefully.......Plus it takes a lot of work to fudge that many games! Still the RTS's are mid 30's FPS :[

I guess we'll find out 8AM EST Jan 14th on Slide 27.
 

Serandur

Member
I'd take that CPU-only (that is, CPU+dedicated graphics) comparison with a large grain of salt. Sure, I can buy that their integrated graphics outperform Intel, but I guess the benchmarks with a GPU use settings designed to be pretty GPU limited in order to minimize CPU performance differences.

AMD can't even build a CPU-only chip which equals i7 performance, so that seems more than a little far fetched.

I agree, however the 20% IPC improvement figure is relatively impressive if true. It makes me wonder why, exactly, there aren't CPU-only parts based on Steamroller coming out. According to available roadmaps, it will only be available on APUs. Have AMD completely abandoned performance desktop chips? At the supposed IPC improvement rate they've been going at, it seemed like only a matter of time until they somewhat caught up with Intel for a short time (what, with their massive ~5% IPC gains per update and inversely proportional overclocking headroom loss/increased power consumption at higher clocks).

Edit: Seriously, where the hell are the FX Steamroller parts? The CPU market is soooo boring at the high-end these days.
 
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