Onboard GPU Performance
AMD’s main focus with the A10-7850K was really on the GPU side of things. The GPU side of things saw a bump from 384 GPU Cores to 512. This increase was accompanied by a lower clock speed, much like on the compute side of things. To put the 7850K’s onboard performance to the test I ran through our new onboard benchmark suite that includes some of the same in game benchmarks that you may have seen on the compute tests, only I have turned the settings down to medium settings to get a better real world test. Much like previous AMD APUs, the 7850K can also crossfire to increase its performance as well. They finally bumped things up slightly and allow crossfire with the R7-240 and R7-250. To see how much of a performance increase you should expect from doing this I have done all of the tests a second time with the 7850K paired up with an MSI R7-250. You can spot those results In the graphs below by looking for the ugly green bars.
To start things off I ran through X264HD again to see how much of a difference running the onboard video would make for encoding. There was a one point increase over running a dedicated GPU, its also important to note that running the 250 in crossfire didn’t help here as well. The 7850K did improve slightly over the previous APUs but still has a long way to go before caching up to what the Intel CPUs were able to do.
In Cinebench the 6800 and 6700 performed well last year but the 7850K improved on that by a considerable margin this time around. Even more impressive were the numbers from the Crossfired R7-250 with the 7850K.
3DMark Fire Strike was my first real taste of what the 7850K could do in a 3D environment. Surprisingly It performed MUCH better than the 6700 before it as well as Intel’s i7-4770K. Adding in the Crossfired GPU improved on those numbers even more showing that their might be a little potential in the 7850K for gaming.
In Heaven Benchmark 4.0 the 7850K performed well once again compared to the 4770K but as you can see none of the numbers were all that impressive at the ultra settings that I ran the test. Adding in the second GPU helped, but still wasn’t powerful enough to push the benchmark as such high settings.
Anyone who says that an onboard GPU can’t game will put their foot in their mouth after seeing our real in game benchmark tests with the settings set to medium (except F1 2013 that was set to ultra). Most of the results are almost spot on with 30 FPS, what is considered playable by most. A little more tweaking on the setting or running at a slightly lower resolution and you would be good to go right out of the box. Of course, adding in the 250 in Crossfire pushed the results up MUCH higher into frame rates that hardly anyone should have issues with. These numbers are even more impressive once you take a look at what the I7-4770K was able to do in the same games. AMD has really stepped things up on the GPU side of things with the 7850K.
