AMD Brazos Platform Benchmarked – Zacate E-350 1.6GHz APU

StarCraft II, Left 4 Dead 2 & Stalker

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a military science fiction
real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment for
Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. A sequel to the award-winning 1998 video
game StarCraft, the game was released worldwide on July 27, 2010. It is
split into three installments: the base game with the subtitle Wings of
Liberty, and two upcoming expansion packs, Heart of the Swarm and
Legacy of the Void. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has had a successful
launch, selling three million copies worldwide in less than a month.

We thought it was interesting that installing StarCraft II from the DVD put system under about 70% load. The game StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has no internal benchmarking
tools built into the game engine, so we recorded a scene and played it
back at normal speed and measured performance with FRAPS. We ran the game at both low and medium quality settings art resolutions of 1280×720, 1280×1024 and 1680×1050.

As you can see running StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty on the Zacate E-350 APU was easily possible with low image quality settings enabled in the game. When we changed the settings to medium the APU was put to work even harder and as you can see the performance went down, but was still near 20FPS at 1280×720.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after
the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl following the ending in
which Strelok destroys the C-Consciousness. Having discovered the open
path to the Zone’s center, the government decides to stage a large-scale
operation to take control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine,
allowing advanced modern graphical features through the use of DirectX
11 to be fully integrated; one outstanding feature being the inclusion
of real-time GPU tessellation. Regions and maps feature photo realistic
scenes of the region it is made to represent. There is also extensive
support for older versions of DirectX, meaning that Call of Pripyat is
also compatible with older DirectX 8, 9, 10 and 10.1 graphics cards.

We tested stalker at 1280×720 with DX11 enabled and was shocked to see double digit performance averages. We couldn’t leave without trying a DX11 title on the new APU, but as you can tell it was pushing the abilities of what the E-350 could do.

Left 4 Dead 2

The Sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead, Left
4 Dead 2 involves the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. There has
been an outbreak of a pathogen that causes infected humans to behave
like zombies. The four survivors have to fight their way through the
hordes of infected, using safehouses along the way to rest and recover
in order to reach extraction points. This takes place in the southern
United States, featuring Savannah, GA and New Orleans, LA.

We found that Left 4 Dead 2 was playable on high quality with no AA and 8x AF enabled if you like to run lower resolutions like 800×600. (A big thanks to Dave over at HotHardware for the L4D benchmark numbers as we were running low on time and he did a game test we wanted and we did some Cinebench R11 and R10 numbers that he wanted.)