AMD A8-3850 APU Gaming Performance Comparison Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,877 words · ~9 min read
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so for this video I'm going to be taking the highest performing of the highest
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performing The Most Extreme of the EXT
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no not okay uh actually this video is
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going to be all about onboard Graphics
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because AMD has just released their new A8 3850 as well as their A6 30 something
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something uh well any anyway the A8 3850 is the one that I'm having a look at
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it's their new Apu and AMD claims has
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onboard discret level direct X11 Graphics so we're going to take that and
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we're going to put it to the test against Intel's core I3
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2105 so this uses Intel HD 3000 graphics
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which is the higher end of the graphics on the Sandy Bridge processor so this
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has the same onboard Graphics as the 2600k and the 2500k but it is a dual
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core lower-end chip that actually is priced similarly to the A8 3850 now for
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a third point of comparison I'm also going to be taking a Radeon
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6670 and I'm going to be plugging it in in dual Graphics mode this is the wrong
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motherboard but it's around here somewhere in dual Graphics mode with the
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A8 3850 to see how much of a performance
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boost we can get by adding a discrete card in dual Graphics mode which used to
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be called hybrid Crossfire so I'm going to be running at 1280 x 720 with a
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variety of games the first one is Dirt 3 if you come in and have a closer look
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you'll probably see that it looks like crap because it's running at 720p with
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everything set to low but the reality of
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it is I want to get reproducible results where I can actually show scaling
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between all of these different Graphics Solutions so I have to I have to have
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something reasonably playable or especially on games where I actually
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have to play through it's going to be very difficult to do consistent uh
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benchmarking runs so stay tuned for more
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and I will be showing you these three solutions up against each other boot wot
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Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a game that looks like it was released like check
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check out check that out check out that Alias thing looks like it was released
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like 8 years ago when you play it on onboard Graphics see here's my fellow
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characters such crappy textures but
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that's what I have to do to Benchmark on board so here we go for crisis 2
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ironically the lowest Graphics setting
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is high because they subscribe to the good better best even better than that
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uh system of doing things obviously
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direct X11 is off with the cor I
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32105 because it does not support direct X11 so here we go crisis 2 is the next
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in my list of oh I haven't even written it down yet
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crisis 2 games to
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Benchmark okay my Benchmark runs finished in crisis 2 but I just wanted
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to show you guys how utterly rubbish it looks with uh
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onboard Graphics so here I'll zoom in as far as I can so you guys can kind of see
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what I'm talking about here there's basically no substantiality to any
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textures at all you see that blurriness that's not from my camera that's just from
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like um being zoomed in but like you just you can't make out anything it's
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kind of terar bad like look at look at these sandbags it just looks like big
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white blobs and performance isn't any good
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either for The Witcher 2 I will be using the
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lowest presets once again at 1280 x 720
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which is technically HD but by the time you set everything to low and are
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running on a 1080p screen so you're dealing with interpolation 720p doesn't
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look very HD at all we'll see how it goes here's the results so far with the
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I3 2105 that's 20.0 not 200 under crisis 2
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by the way Witcher 2 runs pretty terad
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on the uh 2105 as
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well it actually doesn't look bad through the camera but I assure you it's
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not good combat in particular is uh
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pretty choppy you can see the frame rate up
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there ah it's been a while since I've run Mafia 2 as a benchmark so here's the
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settings I'm using all low 720p good stuff and then I'm just going
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to use the uh oh I got to restart the game here I am in the middle of
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benchmarking my cat wants me to throw his toy for him so I will this is his
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toy so now he'll go get
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it sometimes he brings it back sometimes he knocks it down the
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stairs and chases it on his own here's the big finale in the Mafia 2
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Benchmark where's the explosion oh never mind I missed
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it okay well there you go there's the results it's been a while since I've
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benched Black Ops but I figure it's appropriate it's fairly mainstream game
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this is a very mainstream sort of platform onboard Graphics all that stuff
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check out this guy's shirt yeah yeah we're not even getting
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like fantastic frame rates even so but
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yeah we'll see how it compares to the Apu for to come so here I'm
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configurating configurating configuring the integrated Graphics uh forcing
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multim monitor I'm setting everything at the highest I've got 8 gigs of system
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memory so I have no problem with 2 gigs on the uh frame buffer so let's see how
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this goes so now that I'm in Windows with my 6670 I can see that Crossfire is
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enabled with the Apu if I go into the hardware you can see I got my
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6550d my hyper memory I got my oh where'
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it Go 6550d linked adapter built by oh
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okay that's funny it said 6670 just a minute
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ago components
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display 6600 series there we go okay
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good enough so let's run some games now I want to take a short break in my
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testing to show you guys something this is the Aspen canned Benchmark for Dirt 3
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I'm running it on the 669 6670 with the
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Apu running in crossfire X mode now check out these frame rates so I'll wait
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till the race is actually running but when I ran it at 720p low settings it
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destroyed the core I 321 I mean that makes sense we've got a dedicated
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graphics card in there and you but you can see here I am
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still still
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demolishing the 2105 and I've actually
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turned the game all the way up to 1080p
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all high details now so you can see that it's much sharper looking there's a very
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noticeable difference I mean it looks like a racing game from you know 8 years
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ago when you turn the uh when you turn the graphics way down whereas now it
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looks like a Mod racing game with uh pretty decent Graphics so that's uh
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that's the difference it makes I just wanted to show you guys that actually
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the benefit is not necessarily in terms of frame rates from adding these
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Technologies but actually also in terms of dramatically improved graphical
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quality you can see it's still going to outperform it look at that okay guys so
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I'm doing my final run with Dirt 3 with
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the A8 3850 so I'm ready to present my
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results pretty much so I'll talk about everything so far then I'll show you
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guys the results of this one so I've got my 6670 here I've got my corai 3 over
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here and let's have a look at the results so this is my onboard Graphics
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showdown at 1280 by 720 I'm using all
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modern games so yes you're going to see poor scores here but the reality of it
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is these are designed to be run with modern gaming graphics cards not with
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modern onboard so you know they all did their best however I would like you to
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notice something right away so first of all here's the core I 321 105 we have
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for the most part not very playable frame rates we're at that best around
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that 30 FPS range and then in Dirt 3 we managed to get well over it whereas with
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the A8 3850 you can see we're for the most part
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well into that playable range the exception being Mafia 2 so that is the
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difference in performance between the core I 32105 and the A8 3850 in games so
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this is at a very GPU bound resolution but we're looking at more than double
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the performance in Dirt 3 double the performance in Bad Company 2 almost
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double in crisis 2 Double in The Witcher 2 more than double in Mafia 2 and um
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double again in Call of Duty Black Ops so that is the performance Delta between
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the I3 2105 and the 83850 now this was a
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bit of um uh an error on my part but at
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such low graphical settings we're not seeing much of a benefit from this
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additional graphics card so what I wanted to show you guys was yes it does
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consistently beat the non- graphics carded version especially see where
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we're GPU bound it absolutely blows it away it adds about double again the
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performance of a core I 32105 where we're not GPU bound anymore and we're
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running into CPU bound scenarios it doesn't make much of a difference see
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this so here in crisis 2 it makes quite a big difference as well so what I did
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was I actually ran um grid grid 3 Dirt 3
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at 1080p all high with zero anti-aliasing and I got about 60 FPS so
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you can see that we only lose about half of the frame rate versus running it on
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all low 720p however when we take that same game
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and we run it with the A8 3850 which is what I just did we get
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29.7 so you can see that when we are GPU
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bound the crossfire configuration can
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perform up to double of the 3850 on itself which is in
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turn pretty consistently about double a COR 32105 so the reality of it is the
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CPU component is not as powerful as a 2105 in pure um especially dual threaded
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benchmarks it's just not even going to come close but the A8 GPU just or the
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Radeon HD 6550d just destroys the Intel HD
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graphics 3000 so thank you for checking out my video on AMD's latest A8 Apu
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