AMD A10-6800K and A10-6700 Richland APU Reviews

Integrated Graphics Performance

Tomb Raider

On March 5th, 2013 Square Enix released Tomb Raider, billed as a reboot of the franchise. In Tomb Raider, the player is confronted with a much younger Lara Croft who is shipwrecked and finds herself stranded on a mysterious island rife with danger, both natural and human. In contrast to the earlier games Croft is portrayed as vulnerable, acting out of necessity, desperation and sheer survival rather than for a greater cause or personal gain.

The game has been built on Crystal Dynamics’s game engine called the “Crystal Engine” and the graphics look fantastic. AMD and Crystal Dyanmic’s worked on a new technology called TressFX Hair, which AMD describes as “the world’s first in-game implementation of a real-time, per-strand hair physics system” for this game title. We set the image quality to the low quality and medium quality presets for benchmarking.

Benchmark Results: The AMD A10-6800K with AMD Radeon HD 8670D graphics was able to lead at both 1280x1024 and 1920×1080 with both low and medium quality presets. This game title doesn’t look good at all with the low preset, but it looks pretty good with the medium quality setting. We were shocked to see that with the medium quality setting we were able to play this blockbuster 2013 game title without a discrete graphics card at 1920×1080! We’d get a short stutter every so often, but it was easily playable. It should be noted that we maxed out the dedicated memory to each integrated graphics solution, which means 2GB to AMD and 1GB to Intel. The Intel Core i7-4770K ‘Haswell’ CPU with Intel HD 4600 Graphics is a huge step forward for Intel in terms of GPU performance, but they still have not caught up to AMD by any means.

Bioshock Infinite:

BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games, and published by 2K Games. BioShock Infinite is the third installment in the BioShock series, and though it is not part of the storyline of previous BioShock games, it does feature similar gameplay concepts and themes. BioShock Infinite uses a Modified Unreal Engine 3 game engine and was released worldwide on March 26, 2013.

We tested BioShock Infinite with the low and medium game settings at both 1280×1024 and 1920×1080.

Benchmark Results: The AMD A10-6800K with AMD Radeon HD 8670D graphics was just a hair faster than the AMD A10-5800K APU when both are running 2133MHz. The AMD A10-6800K is roughly 50% faster than the Intel Core i7-4770K at 1920×1080 with the low preset, which is pretty impressive.

Hitman: Absolution

Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stealth DirecX 11 video game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix. It is the fifth entry in the Hitman game series, and runs on IO Interactive’s proprietary Glacier 2 game engine. This game title uses the Glacier 2 game engine and was released on November 20th, 2012.

We benchmarked Hitman: Absolution with the low and medium game settings at both 1280×1024 and 1920×1080.

Benchmark Results: Hitman: Absolution is tough on discrete graphics cards, so we knew it would be tough on processor graphics. We were shocked to see that at 1920×1080 the AMD A10-6800K was able to average 26FPS and the game play was pretty good. If you want to run an A10-6800K Richland APU, the sweet spot for this game title and processor is 1680×1050 with the medium preset.