Performance - Integrated APU Graphics Engine
Monitor Setup
Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly set up.
This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.
Performance - Integrated APU Graphics Engine
Now, we've been chatting up on the embedded IGP inside the APU, you can make use of it if you purchase a Lynx Series 4, 6 or 8 based processor/APU. With some 400 shader cores and raw horsepower of the A8 series you can game.
For serious gamers really we recommend you to look into a dedicated graphics card for gaming. But if you lower image quality settings a little gaming at 1600x1200 is within range. Mind you, the A8 models have the 400 shader processor graphics core, which is faster then the A4 and A6 models.
Far Cry 2
Above, a Core i5 661, Core i5 2500K (Sandy Bridge) and the new 3870K APU from AMD. As you can see, there's a massive difference in performance compared to Intel's embedded solutions... This is DX9 mode with high quality settings, yet no AA is enabled.
The AMD A8-3870K BE (900) entry is the embedded GPU overclocked to 900 MHz.
3DMark Vantage
3Dmark Vantage also confirms the much better overall IGP performance, roughly 5000 point P score in 3Dmark Vantage when overclocked. However, the P score takes the processor performance into account, if you focus on the GPU score at nearly 4800 points, that is still a massive increase.
And for those interested in 3DMark 11 -- being the only DX11 ready IGP there is just one score. So overall for an IGP, this is pretty impressive stuff. But let's move onwards to CPU performance.
