Onboard Performance

So the CPU performance was interesting because I know people might upgrade later to use dedicated GPUs on their new APUs but the most important thing right now is just how good the onboard performance is. The Vega graphics is what sets these apart from the rest of the Ryzen lineup and the potential of having passable onboard performance that can actually be used for gaming is exciting. To start things off I ran the OpenGL test in Cinebench R15 and the results were promising. The 2400G topped the charts by a good margin and even the 2200G was right there on par with the i7-5775C that Intel brought out a few years ago that had great onboard performance.

From there I wanted to check out the synthetic benchmark 3DMark using both the Fire Strike and Time Spy tests. These test DX11 and DX12 performance. In Fire Strike, I think the results speak for themselves. Both APUs dwarfed all of the other CPUs with onboard and while the 2400G has a big lead over the 2200G it is had to tell with how far they are both ahead of the 5775C and everything else. Time Spy wasn’t really any different as well, with the 2200G doubling performance and the 2400G doing even more than that.

For Unigine based tests I used the old Valley Benchmark as well as the new Superposition test. With Valley, I tested using the ExtremeHD setting and the FPS results were once again well above everything else though not at an FPS that I would consider smooth at all. In Superposition, I tested using the 1080p Medium setting as it is a more realistic benchmark as well as the 720p low setting. Who would have ever thought you would see a low-end Ryzen 3 product with twice the performance of the much more expensive i7’s that launched months ago.

For the rest of my testing, I focused on actual game benchmarks. In TF2 it is an older game that as we saw in the CPU testing is a lot more CU limited so the gap between the two APUs and the rest of the CPUs tested wasn’t as large but they did still do much better. Imagine how well these would perform with a Ryzen 7 CPU attached. Then in the rest of my tests, each game showed over and over that the 2400G and 2200G are worlds above anything else on the DIY market for onboard performance. The biggest thing to take away from these results though was that almost all of the results actually have an FPS up to or above 60 FPS so you can expect smooth gameplay. This is something that every new APU has promised in the past but didn’t really give. Now all of those in that range are at 1080p on medium settings, Grid Autosport, for example, showed that turning things up to Ultra did drop the performance down into the 30 FPS range, but even then they were still both twice as fast as everything else. Now I did try to test using a new game as well with Ghost Recon Wildlands and both APUs played the benchmark but I had trouble with the game locking up at the end of the test every time. I didn’t have any issues with this when testing with a dedicated GPU so I’m curious as to the reason for this, but I did want to warn everyone in case there are other compatibility issues with the game with the current drivers.