Performance - Integrated APU Graphics Core
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 A6 models have the 320 shader processor graphics core.
Far Cry 2
Above, a Core i5 661, Core i5 2500K (Sandy Bridge) and the A6-3500 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 Antialiasing is disabled.
1024x768 would be playable.
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage confirms the much better overall IGP performance compared to the competition. We can see that the A8 series APU's have 80 shader processors and accompanying tech more though.
And for those interested in 3DMark 11 -- being the only DX11 ready IGP there is just one score. Overall for an IGP, this is pretty impressive stuff. But obviously far far away from mainstream dedicated graphics card performance.
One last game title, Resident Evil, a dated title. Again strong leads over the competition IGP wise, and sure in DX9 mode without AA gaming at 1280x1024 is possible.
