AMD Shows Off A-Series APU’s Performance Increase on Windows 8.1

AMD has published a new blog post celebrating the partnership and collaboration between Microsoft and AMD. Specifically, the blog presented data that showed performance measurement gains in a Windows 8.1 environment from AMDs new A-series APU.

The AMD A10-6800K offers a heterogeneous compute advantage of up to 13% against the >60% more expensive competitor product – and a gaming performance advantage of nearly 50%. Windows 8.1 is a free update for Windows 8 users, and can be installed through the Microsoft Store, meaning any consumer with an AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) based PC can increase performance by nearly 10% simply through installing the Windows 8.1 update, and AMDs latest Catalyst driver.

So from where does that uplift come? Our work with Microsoft includes development on the essential operating system “plumbing” that enables Windows to directly leverage AMD technology in order to run more efficiently. The two companies also cooperate on the development and tuning of the latest AMD video drivers.

Of course AMD’s fast CPU and GPU cores contribute to high performance, but having software that is optimized to take advantage of the AMD hardware architecture is a significant advantage. Tuning our device drivers to simultaneously suit AMD hardware, software applications, and Windows 8.1 makes systems more streamlined. Take a look at some of the results that are available from day one with Windows 8.1 on AMD-based PCs versus our competition²:

It seems like with all of the NVIDIA news this week, AMD wanted to make sure enthusiasts didnt forget about them especially when it comes to Windows 8.1 performance.