AMD Beema and Mullins APU Performance – 3rd Generation APUs

Gaming Performance – Dirt

Dirt Showdown is a game developed and published by Codemasters for Windows, X-box 360 and Playstation 3. Originally released in June 2012, it is a part of the Colin McRae Rally game series and uses the EGO gaming engine developed by Codemasters and Sony. The Ego engine allows rendering of highly detailed damage, large scale environments and more realistic physics. The player is placed in a series of events that offer a wide range of racing tournaments across different tracks. As events are won, the player is provided game money to purchase additional cars or upgrades to their existing cars. Codemasters has done a nice job at integrating a static benchmark, allowing us to get a good picture of the gaming performance. As this is going to be used to benchmark tablets, we will utilize the Low graphic settings for the test, while keeping the resolution at 1920×1080.

The previous graphics tests showed the AMD Discovery tablet having a huge advantage over the HP Atom tablet, Dirt Showdown shows a difference, however the difference comes across as 1 FPS, that comes to 6.2% difference in performance in Dirt Showdown.

While AMD envisions different accessories to go along with tablets, one is a gaming add-on. Here the tablet can slide into the cradle giving the user multiple controls that most are familiar with already from the console world; additional trigger buttons are located above the joysticks, like they are on modern console controllers.

The gaming controller accessory isn’t the only one that AMD envisions, they also see the need for a docking station to provide video output up to 4K resolutions at 30Hz, ethernet connectivity, and USB ports. A top mounted web camera is also a possibility, allowing the tablet to lay flat and still utilize the web camera; this seems to be un-necessary as a front and rear camera could provide the same functionality (obviously without being able to be laid flat).