The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Wednesday, February 21

Geek

Xbox-on-a-Chip

Getting away from politics to happier subjects for a moment, AMD have released their desktop Ryzen APUs - that is, processors with embedded graphics.  The first batch of Ryzen chips (like the R7 1700 I'm using now) had up to 8 cores but no graphics; these have only 4 cores but use the other half of the space to provide the best integrated graphics of any PC CPU ever.*

There are two models, the $99 R3 2200G, and the $169 R5 2400G.  The R5 is up to 30% faster on multi-threaded workloads and up to 50% faster on graphics, but there's a big factor of "it depends".  If you only have 4 active threads the R3 will perform within about 5% of the R5, and depending on the game you want to play, memory speed might be a more significant factor in frame rates than the APU itself.

The question really is, though, can I play games on this thing without having to buy a discrete graphics card which currently thanks to goddamn Blipcoin miners range upwards of eleventy billion dollars?

And the answer seems to be, hell yes.


You're not going to be playing at 4k 60Hz, but GTA5 is quite playable even on the $99 model, with stock cooler, slow memory, at 1080p and with quality settings mostly on high.  Some other games need you to turn the quality or resolution settings down a little to retain good frame rates, but it's still running at an integer multiple of Intel's integrated graphics.

* The best integrated graphics ever belong to the Xbox One X, the chip for which is also made by AMD.  Second place goes to Sony's Playstation 4 Pro, which uses a chip made by...  AMD.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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