How are APUs working? Buggs or what ?

Hello there, I bought Samsung 535u3c and when I play more demanding games, they arent playable. My friend had just bought hp laptop - 6465b with A6-3410MX and he has higher fps by high margin. I have my turbo working and overclocked GPU. APU doesnt overheat I think. It has at most 78°C for both CPU and GPU. I will add printscreen with graph from System Monitor when I was playing Crysis 2 barely playable on 1024x768 with the lowest details. Btw in crysis 2 is cpu utilization about 75%, so it shouldn´t be cpu bottleneck...

 

I have an HP g4 that had A6-4400m that was fine, and upgraded it to an A10-4600m, which also works fine.

You realize you've got a 17W chip vs your friend's 45W chip, right? I'm not surprised that his frame rates are higher. That and the graphics side of your chip has less shaders than your friends.

 

In theory the two APUs should be somewhat equivalent in 3D graphics as long as you both are running similar RAM configurations. Your APU is a Trinity with two "cores" so while it may have higher IPC, your friend's Llano is an actual quad core so it will perform better in Crysis 2.

Crysis 2 GPU & CPU Performance Test

EDIT: In regards to the first reply,

A couple thoughts.

17W just means a lower wattage chip. Wattage is not inherently linked to performance. They are also different families of APU (Trinity vs Llano) so you can't compare them directly.

You also can't directly compare shaders. Four Trinity shaders are roughly worth five Llano shaders in gaming performance. That is because Trinity's IGP is based on AMD's VLIW4 while Llano is VLIW5. Want a direct comparison? Compare, say, a Radeon 6770 to newer Radeon 7750 and 7770.

Radeon 6770
VLIW5
800 Stream Processors (AKA shaders)
850MHz core
4.8GHz memory

Radeon 7750
VLIW4
512 Stream Processors (AKA shaders)
800MHz core
4.5GHz memory

Radeon 7770
VLIW4
640 Stream Processors (AKA shaders)
1000MHz core
4.5GHz memory

Benchmarks courtesy of TECHSPOT



You can see that even the 7750 with inferior "numbers" of core/memory clocks and much fewer Stream Processors/Shaders but with VLIW4 can outperform the older VLIW5 based 6770.

This graph was handpicked of course because it most closely matched what the OP wants to play. In some other games the older card can surpass the 7750, but still not the 7770.

 

But his GPU is VLIW5 and mine is VLIW4 so less shaders doesnt mean less performance. I am wondring, why is my GPU working on 40%, when I am playing....

I played Crysis 2 on old turion ZM-82 X2 2.2Ghz and I had on low settings about 45fps with 3870M. If is crysis 2 cpu depending, so why is Crysis 2 using CPU for 70% and not for 100%?

 

It could be that the extra threads are competing with each other, causing overall slowing.

 

It could also be that it is efficiently using 2 or 3 cores and that it only has light workloads to send to the 3rd and/or 4th core. I haven't seen a game that did use 4 cores at 100% all of the time, it could for example be using the last core for lighter loads like audio processing and such.

 

Crysis 2 is very CPU dependent. That being said, as others have mentioned, you have a lower power consumption CPU which might contribute to lower gaming performance. Although your iGPU is more robust than his, his Llano model also has 4 cores and 4 threads - yours is dual core with 2 threads. I would think you two would get comparable performance, but if you refer to that link, it sort of makes sense, as the game seems to utilize the CPU quite a bit.

 

BF3 will stress 8 cores 100% of the time, lol. But besides that I still can't imagine Crysis 2 not taxing the system. Be sure you have two sticks of RAM though. And the APU will be competing for resources between CPU and GPU. The Trinity A6 is a dual core, so it loses advantages right there, plus it is a slower chip.

 

I didn't say that it wasn't taxing the system, only that not everything might be parallelized, sometimes, you can't just run everything in parallel, Amdahl's law eventually comes to bit you in the rear when you're trying to run things on multiple cores. On the other hand, multi-thread implementation might not be optimal.

Anyways, my point was that the game while taxing might simply be incapable of fully using 3 or 4 cores, but can still benefit from them.

 

But my problem is that Crysis 2 uses this two ULV cores on 70% and another problem is that GPU use is about 50%. And please don´t tell me how I can´t run Crysis 2 on this CPU, because that old turion should perform about the same and I had good FPS on it.

 

Very well could be an overlooked driver or power configuration. The only other thing that would seem like a hindrance whatsoever is the TDP, but it should still outperform that Turion.

 

If I would uninstall win 8 and install win 7, is it possile to gain some performance or battery life?

 

Windows 8 is actually suppose to be slightly less resource heavy, so no that's very unlikely - unless you make some modifications and sacrifice Aero glass themes. But the difference in resource consumption or battery life would hardly be noticeable even if you did that.

Besides, I think with Windows 8 systems, you can only downgrade, not do a fresh Windows install from 8.

 

There are a few possibilities on the software side that could cause the problems:
1. Drivers.
Make sure that you have latest drivers installed and that all traces of previous ones were removed (via Ccleaner).

2. Bloatware.
If you received your laptop with pre-installed software, it would be prudent to remove it all... or simply re-install Windows 8 on your own and authorize it using the product key you own.

 

It is simply, because the 17W TDP headroom. For the CPU part itself not enough the 17W and than what is left for GPU? I recently tested the A10-4655M and still very limited with 25W TDP room...

 

And if you were playing crysis with a 3870M, this once again demonstrates how different the laptop is: the 3870M had a 55W peak draw. It had way more thermal room to run a demanding game. The chip you got is meant to be great on power consumption, not games.