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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

If you consider "Extreme PC Gaming" to be AAA games at 1080p on low settings, sure.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21208/amd-unveils-ryzen-8000g...

For a desktop without an additional $200-$500 graphics card this is impressive.

Why can't we just acknowledge that "extreme gaming" in a rather absurd term to describe the APU in question? The fact that the performance doesn't suck as much as it used to doesn't make it less absurd.

Extreme gaming is close to maxing out currently available performance oriented hardware regardless the cost so unless those APUs can produce results comparable to top of the line CPU paired with something like RTX4090, it doesn't belong with "extreme gaming" in any way.

This type of language is used everywhere in the gaming hardware segment. I think it is kinda tacky, but it has to be working if the entire industry adopted it.

Intel's 2nd generation UMA GPUs, which were branded "Intel Extreme Graphics", were likewise far from extreme.

I just sold my old GTX 1050 Ti for $35, and it vastly outperforms Vega 11.

iGPUs are useful, they just aren't great value for budget gaming PCs (unless we're talking super-duper low budget, where a $50 used GPU is really going to break the bank). HTPC/NAS that's going to run Jackbox at 4K occasionally? Great use case for an R5 with an iGPU.

Why are you comparing to Vega? These new chips have RDNA iGPUs.

While I agree that buying a used GPU will be probably net you better performance per dollar, the 1050Ti is significantly slower than the 780M and even 760M and uses significantly more power.

Some benchmarks can be seen here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Cjnep8j-o

A couple reasons: Vega 11 is the best iGPU on a desktop CPU that you can actually buy right now. Preliminary benchmarks on engineering samples are fun to ogle at, but aren't necessarily an accurate representation of the product that will actually land on your local Microcenter's shelves. Then there's the estimated MSRP - only the 8500G's $180 price tag fits the "budget gaming PC" description, and even that's pushing it. You can also buy a better GPU than a 1050Ti for less than $50 used.

That price range might have been accurate 7 years ago, but modern graphics cards for gaming range from $300 to $1000 with the highest level pushing $2000 thanks to the AI craze. The higher prices make quality iGPUs all the more relevent - especially since the "gamer" demographic continues growing and many of the most popular games are not particularly demanding.

Platforms, especially AM5, are very expensive too. Ryzen 8000 is far slower than even the slowest new discrete GPU.

The real value option is buying an older platform (AM4) and a used discrete GPU, from back when prices were more sane.

... if electricity was free.

Power efficiency wise, a discrete GPU won't compare favorably.

Dunno if thats true.

Assume mid range 200w gpu. Assume 20 eurocents per kWh (I live in the northern europe and pay about as much on a flexible contract). Assume a decent PSU. A year of gaming (assume, very optimistically, 365hrs) is circa 17 eur for the electricity. Considering relative perf differences, I'd say a discrete GPU compares favourably.

65W TDP for CPU + GPU in power-constrained environments, or when you want to have less battery storage requirements for renewables/backup power, is quite the boon.

I had a 5700G (I think) last year and the system would go up to 150W max. I could survive about 2-3h of no electricity with my small inverter battery setup if I kept usage minimal (no work, no gaming). Handy performance wise for a mostly work machine with some indie gaming on the side, but these 8000 series are under half that wattage.

Admittedly this isn't the most common need/concern, but it's good to know options are getting better all the time.

It would be more useful to compare idle power, APU vs chiplet-based CPU + discrete GPU combo.

A used graphics card good enough to play 1080p games on low settings would not be very expensive at all.

I actually bought an RX 580 8 GB new for 139 EUR last year (most likely sat around some warehouse in an unopened box for years) - it has no issues running most indie games or even the decently optimized AAA games at 1080p, which was an upgrade over my previous RX 570 4 GB.

The only actual issues I ran into were when I tried running it for PCVR (Quest 2) because the latest drivers actually cause crashes and instability, although I could fix that by rolling back to either the 2020 or 2022 drivers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38870500

Sometimes hardware from generations ago is not only decently affordable, but also sufficient for what you want to do, as long as your standards aren't super high. Getting some of that hardware with no previous owners also feels a bit interesting, albeit I've also bought used CPUs off of AliExpress for my homelab servers with no issues either.

You can find used 1080ti's for like $100 nowadays. I still use one for 1440p gaming and get excellent frames with most games. Kinda mind blowing value

100% 1080Ti is insane value, I have two of them and zero complaints, the 11 gigs of vram make it great for inference as well.

this GPU was so good at the time that it started cannibalizing sales of higher end data center cards, and Nvidia had to put terms in the EULA for the drivers to try to legally prevent this.

Aren't these the remnants of the Bitcoin gold-rush age?

Please tell me where I can get a used 1080 ti (that works) for $100.

6 seconds. This one is $90.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/375175111524?hash=item575a2de364:g:...

Wow, at that price they even threw in the zip tie?

That's a 1080 (8GB), not a 1080 Ti (11GB).

But, I believe you that they're out there.

Not really, since the APUs themselves are historically quite expensive.

That hasn’t been true for the Zen based models at least. The 5700G and now the 8700G occupy the $350-370 price slot. My comparable 13th gen Intel CPU with lesser graphics was the same price. That’s a great value for a casual gamer.

I’m sure at some point we’ll see Intel based APU equivalents on desktop with some teeth. Intel needs to solve their driver issues first.

> That’s a great value for a casual gamer.

It depends. If you're truly performance insensitive and have to buy new, maybe, but these APUs are extremely slow compared to even older, low end discrete GPUs.

AM5 is an expensive platform. The total cost of a DDR4 platform is peanuts in comparison.

The cpus are currently significantly more expensive, yes, but is the AM5 platform that much more expensive than AM4?

On AM4, pcpartpicker says I can get an A520M board for $70, and 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL18 for $55; total $125

On AM5, an A620M board is $75, and 2x16GB DDR5-5600 starts at $76; total $151.

The real question is where the Microcenter bundle pricing will end up, if you live near a Microcenter.

Mmm, A620 has come down considerably since I last checked. That's good.

63 fps on Cyberpunk 2077 which when it came out was "unplayable but on the most powerful PCs" is incredibly impressive without a GPU.

This is pretty close to my 2070 GPU does, which cost me $400+ a couple years ago and uses 215W. My CPU also uses 100W, so about 300W compared to 65W for very roughly similar performance (in some games) is still pretty incredible.

Now GPUs are almost twice that for that xx70's and xx80's cards. I don't know what market this is aimed at, but this is very impressive for an APU. There's a pretty strong budget PC gamer community that could benefit from this. There are a lot of people who can't afford gaming PCs anymore and this could be a big seller to the budget community. Also at 65TDP power supply and fans and ventilation costs will be low, so they can be sold in cheap and modest cases and ps's.

I'm not sure if these chips translate into laptops, but a laptop that games well is always desirable in the gaming market.

> This is pretty close to my 2070 GPU does

Not even remotely close. It's equivalent to an RX570 or 580, which is roughly 1050 territory. Your 2070 is equivalent roughly to a 1080, plus raytracing.

> Cyberpunk when it came out [..] unplayable but on the most powerful PCs is incredibly impressive without a GPU.

The game has seen numerous patches in the last three years since it was released that have significantly increased its performance.

>It's equivalent to an RX570 or 580

RX 6500, in more recent parlance.

I would however wait for third party reviews on these SoCs. They promise performance that's simply unheard of, for an APU. Best to be skeptic than else.

It's a side effect of the laptop efforts... Getting a price and margin that makes sense. Using the same tech in desktop form makes sense for a lot of people. A $600 or so desktop that can game albeit at lower settings is pretty impressive these days.

> 63 fps on Cyberpunk 2077 which when it came out was "unplayable but on the most powerful PCs" is incredibly impressive without a GPU.

Cyberpunk got a ton of (performance) fixes after release, so not exactly relevant.

Cyberpunk scaled pretty well on CPUs and had a lot of graphical options. Digital foundry covered it pretty well

On AMD APUs, 65W thermal design power roughly corresponds to 85W electrical.

For an upgrade to a PC which fits, PSU and all, into a tiny case like this one:

https://store.nfc-systems.com/products/skyreach-4-tiny

with purely vanilla off-the-shelf parts - I definitely do. I will take these APUs every day of the week and so would millions of people for whom this is the new extreme in their PC system configuration space.

If this fits in a mini pc that would be pretty nice. A NUC sized box that plays cyberpunk, not bad

Pretty close to where a lot of the higher end mini PCs land... It's not a bad thing.

The minisforums designs (like UM790 Pro etc) are getting increasingly impressive. They have had a bumpy road but they really have finally figured out getting LM to work in a production product. You can't open it but you don't have to - everything that's user-accessible is in a service bay. UM790 Pro is perpetually ~$519-539 or w/e, and they also have a newer version with an oculink in addition to the 2x usb4/thunderbolt ports.

[LM: liquid metal, gallium-indium alloy with high conductivity but liquid at room temperature, and conductive, which makes it tedious and exacting to apply etc, but it's the only way to keep pushing thermal density upwards to that degree. PS5 used it as well, and that's part of how they pushed form factor down a ton in a fairly high-TDP product.]

Minisforum also had a laptop CPU on a mITX board which frankly is also an underexplored niche, why is that one chinese company (edit: erying) the only ones putting tiger lake onto a socket etc? Atoms etc aren't the only way that low-end market can be tapped, and big chipsets with tons of IO don't make sense on that kind of product anyway. Even the ryzen desktop chips provide a "SOC platform" that can do USB, ethernet, and a few other things iirc - it's used in things like the DeskMini/Deskmeet X300 series, look at the addons they need, it does pull the mobo cost way down.

(AMD does not allow X300 to be used in this way, X300 mobos cannot be sold standalone, has to be integrated into a product which is licensed separately, can't lose the bundled sale. Imagine if those firewall appliances etc could run a 5700X3D or 7940HS instead of a 1165G7 or 1125G4 or whatever. that would be awful.)

Long-term support is not great (things fall off pretty quickly from what I've heard) and really ideally I'd also like to see them support ECC (7940HS supports it) to open up the homelab market a little more. Because they're doing these really zany powerful things, they crammed a 7940HS into a NUC formfactor and routed it out efficiently into things for people who want to expand, etc. They're cooking, and as the oculink and MCIO and other breakout ecosystems start to mature things are gonna get interesting for the NUC market. And they're already interesting for GENOAD8X-2T and so on too. People are realizing the need for this to be more modular than PCIe edge card/ATX allow in a regular tower form factor. The children yearn for PCIe lanes, they just don't know why or how.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nu-GKq58Og

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IfArhUdAm8

(this can be extended to an interleaved network of 5 nodes, where with only 2 links per node you are tolerant to no more than 1 node failing yet only 2 hops to any other node) https://i.imgur.com/i56PdsC.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O08LG64fvqI

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-genoad8x-2t-bcm-rev...

> X300 mobos cannot be sold standalone

Doesn't seem to be an issue for the X600. You may have seen this review [1]. The AM5D4ID-2T/BCM isn't cheap, but it doesn't have a real chipset either.

[1] https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-am5d4id-2t-bcm-revi...

yee I did see that. another round of psychedelics for the boys at asrock, what an absolute crackhead design team, in the absolute best way. X99-ITX [0][1][2] and X299-ITX[3][4][[5] were both masterpieces in their own way too, and they've been one of the teams that has been cooking the hardest with intel and AMD both. Supermicro is there too but a lot more conservative at times, except[6] (look at the usb, and... audio...)...

good point, hadn't considered that board. I do hope they loosen up, but a high-end server market board is not completely the same thing either.

[0] https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=https://static.twe...

[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=https://static.twe...

[2] https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=https://static.twe...

[3] https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=https://static.twe...

[4] https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=https://static.twe...

[5] https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=https://static.twe...

[6] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/x13sae-f

(please read the reviews of the site whose effort i've leached forever, and it's actual old-school good review content)

https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7112/asrock-x99e-itx-ac-mi...

https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8404/asrock-x299e-itx-ac-m...

The Asrock Rack series are really really good now and I think both their AM4 and SP3 platforms are really appealing. ROMED8-2T is everything a motherboard should be. Except for SFP+, of course. But Asrock Rack's design teams really have a good pulse on what the prosumer/homelab/soho market wants, they have been pumping out a ton of great designs lately.

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=R...

it's average frame rate too

99%ile (or even minimum) would be far more interesting

I'm pretty sure this product line targets people who can't afford a new GPU and aren't aware of the used hardware market. 60fps average and arbitrarily low 1%-low fps is totally acceptable for this segment.

Recall that a lot of games ran at 30fps in the PS3 era. Back then people would unironically say "the human eye can't see 60fps". Even today a lotta gamers have never experienced low latency

I'd agree if AMD's title didn't explicitly say "Extreme PC Gaming"

Extreme PC Gaming in 2024 is not 60fps at 1080p, it wasn't even in 2018

Precisely. This is for when used hardware is not an option.

I just do regular pc gaming - am I allowed to buy these EXTREME processors?

Compared to consoles, that is extreme

It's six year old mid-tier performance.

AMD marketing had to dig pretty deep to find decent numbers...4-5 year old games. Metro Exodus? Shadow of the Tomb Raider? GTA 5? And some random kid's game nobody has ever heard of?

Given the choices are between "buggy as hell" (Intel) "space heater and slightly buggy" (AMD discreet) and "good but stupidly overpriced" (Nvidia), a fourth option, for the low end of the market, is welcome.

Edit: since I'm being downvoted for claiming the games listed aren't relevant: go look at steamcharts. GTA5 and Dota are the only top 25 games; Cyberpunk is #26. The rest aren't even top 100 games.

Kid's game? Tiny Tina/Borderlands is a huge franchise in gaming. I think its clear these two games were chosen because the cell-shaded style they use is less GPU demanding, but its still impressive. But note things like Cyberpunk 2077 is there too. These are all popular games. I don't think its this dishonest ploy you're making out to be.

My 2070 barely handles those games at that fps.

Yes those are older games because this APU is not going to play modern AAA at 4k, but it can handle some pretty hefty games fairly well and might be tempting to budget gamers especially when mid-tier cards start at $500-600 nowadays.

There are 2,000 people playing Tiny Tina on Steam.

There are a million people playing CS2. Fortnite sees about 2.6 million and peaks at eleven million.

The Finals has 70,000+ people playing.

Tiny Tina has about 1/5th of the player count it would need to be in the top 100. So yes, AMD marketing was pretty fucking desperate when they listed that game.

> There are 2,000 people playing Tiny Tina on Steam.

The game is cross-platform and available on PS4/PS5, Xbox X/S, Xbox One, Steam and Epic Store. And on top of that it is a paid game. I'm not even aware what this game is, but I'm aware of Borderlands franchise and they're quality games.

Why would you compare player numbers to top f2p games is beyond me.

That game selection isn't an accident. They're all extremely popular and/or have a benchmark built-in.

Look at any third-party review and you'll find a very similar selection.

With the exception of GTA5 and DOTA2, none of the games they list are even in the top 50 on Steamcharts.

"and/or have a benchmark built in" doing a whole lot of lifting...

And League of Legends and World of Tanks. Why would you expect to find singpleplayer to top the charts? Especially when they're not new.

Crysis was used in benchmarks for how long exactly? And it wasnt like it was a blockbuster either...

Maybe you should make an actual performance argument instead of a popularity contest.

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