AMD APU: How Much Progress Has Been Made?

Discrete GPU Benchmarks – 3DMark and 1080p Games

3DMark

3DMark Firestrike is Futuremark’s latest creation for testing the GPU performance of high end gaming PCs using Direct X 11 graphics. You can download a free basic version of 3DMark here.

Testing AMD’s APUs with a discrete GPU essentially means putting them in “CPU only” mode as the iGPU cannot do anything. As just pure CPUs we see that CPU performance in synthetic game benchmarks has declined and not recovered to Llano levels which is sad.

Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is a first person shooter developed by Irrational Games that is the third instalment of the Bioshock series. The game is the last to be produced by Irrational Games before they announced their closure in February 2014. The game has sold over 4 million copies since its 2013 release.

However, moving onto a real-world GPU-dependant game and we see generational improvements of very small amounts each time.

Metro: Last Light

Metro: Last Light is a single-player first-person shooter video game with survival horror and stealth elements, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in May 2013.

Metro Last Light is a more CPU-bound game than Bioshock and we see generational improvements across the board which is nice.

Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is a popular action-adventure video game published by Square Enix based on the Tomb Raider franchise. The game was released in 2013 and as of March 2014 had sold 6 million copies.

Tomb Raider’s results appear to be totally random, clearly it isn’t a very CPU-bound game.