AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 1
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 27, 2012 12:00 AM ESTMinecraft
Switching gears for the moment we have Minecraft, our OpenGL title. It's no secret that OpenGL usage on the PC has fallen by the wayside in recent years, and as far major games go Minecraft is one of but a few recently released major titles using OpenGL. Minecraft is incredibly simple—not even utilizing pixel shaders let alone more advanced hardware—but this doesn't mean it's easy to render. Its use of massive amounts of blocks (and the overdraw that creates) means you need solid hardware and an efficient OpenGL implementation if you want to hit playable framerates with a far render distance. Consequently, as the most successful OpenGL game in quite some number of years (at over 7.5mil copies sold), it's a good reminder for GPU manufacturers that OpenGL is not to be ignored.
Minecraft does incredibly well on Trinity. While the improvement over Llano is only 15%, the advantage over Ivy Bridge is tremendous.
Civilization V
Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression. There are other games that are more stressful overall, but this is likely the game most stressing of DX11 performance in particular.
Civilization V shows some of the mildest gains in all of our tests vs. Llano. The 5800K/7660D manage to outperform Llano by only 8 -11% depending on the test. The advantage over Intel is huge of course.
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deontologist - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Anand - always 3 months late to the party.Devo2007 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
What are you talking about? AMD is just now lifting the NDA on the Trinity A10-5800K & A8-5600K desktop CPUs (and even then, sites can only talk about GPU performance).If any site had reviewed a Trinity APU several months ago, it was the mobile version (A10-4600M). Anandtech even reviewed it here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/amd-trinity-rev...
karasaj - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I believe he was referring to this:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-a8-5...
Samus - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
None of those numbers compare Trinity to the competition. They're mostly worthless.Samus - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Engadget has word the A10 is aiming at i3 prices and i5 performance on the CPU side. We've already seen A8 and A10 cream the i3 and i5 in GPU. I'm excited. I haven't built an AMD system in years, and the A8 65w might be a perfect HTPC CPU.jwcalla - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Tom's has benchmarks against a Core i3-2100 if you'd like to see how it stacks up.Samus - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
i can't find any of tom's benchmarks showing a comparison of THESE chips against any Intel chips. They all compare the A10 and A8 to eachother.GazP172 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
If its anything like the Lano, the top end 65w's will basically only be released to the OEM's. Which to me are the only ones worth having.Taft12 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
That was because of AMD's lousy yields and contracts which prioritized access of the supply to the likes of HP and Acer over the retail channel.OEMs still have first dibs, but yield issues are apparently better now. I have high hopes for the 65W parts (which includes actually being able to buy them on Newegg!) The A10-5700 could be the best of all worlds.
mikato - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link
Agree! I want to A10-5700 probably. No brainer.