AMD Ryzen Mobile Benchmarks And Performance: Taking On Intel In Laptops
HP Envy x360 With Ryzen Mobile Gaming Benchmarks
Moving on to the graphics and gaming side of AMD Ryzen Mobile, we've got both synthetic benchmarks and real light-duty game engines on tap. The trick here is to find "playable" performance levels across a variety of metrics and within reason for a lightweight, mainstream laptop. Again, Ryzen Mobile isn't intended to deliver hard core enthusiast gaming, but rather significantly better gaming and multimedia performance versus other integrated graphics solutions in market. Let's take a look at how it stacks up and we'll start with the popular yardstick of 3DMark.
Futuremark’s well-known 3DMark benchmark suite features tests aimed at different types of computing devices. We opted for the Cloud Gate and Sky Diver tests here, for which we have plenty of comparison data, but also as light-duty 3D graphics and gaming benchmarks that are well-targeted for thin and light laptops. Sky Diver is a bit more strenuous, but still well within the limits of our sub-5 pound test group.
Sure, Far Cry 2 has been around the block a few times and is many years old, but it is still a good test for entry-level PCs and ultrabooks alike. It features high quality textures, complex shaders, and dynamic lighting to create a rich and immersive environment. More importantly, it includes a reliable benchmarking tool. We ran this benchmark at 1080p on the " Very High" detail preset with DirectX 10. It is actually still a great yardstick to see just how far integrated graphics solutions have come.
GRID Autosport is a cross-platform racing simulation developed by Codemasters. After the luke-warm reception of GRID 2, due to its less than realistic racing model, the Codemasters team set out to improve GRID Autosport's handling and environment to make it feel like more of a true racing simulator. The game is based on Codemasters' EGO engine that has an amped-up physics and damage system that adds to the immersion and authenticity. Codemasters also tuned the engine to perform well over a wide variety of mainstream systems, so it makes for a good watermark for a medium-duty graphics workload. It also actually happens to be listed as "optimized for integrated Intel HD Graphics."
Futremark 3DMark Benchmarks
Both 3DMark Cloud Gate and Sky Diver show AMD's Ryzen 5 2500U mobile processor significantly ahead of Intel UHD 620 graphics in 8th Gen Kaby Lake processors. This Ryzen Mobile chip is also over 15 percent faster than a discrete GeForce 940MX GPU, coupled with a 7th Gen Kaby Lake Core i7 chip in the HP Spectre x360 15. However, a discrete Pascal-based NVIDIA GeForce MX150 chip coupled with Intel 8th Gen Core series, as we see in the top Acer Swift 3 score, is significantly faster, with a 20 - 35 percent performance advantage.
Far Cry 2 - Vintage DX10 FPS Gaming
Here Ryzen Mobile puts an absolute beat-down on Intel UHD 620 graphics, almost doubling its frame rate at 1080p with Very High image quality settings. However, the same can be said for the discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX150m which dominated here. Regardless, it's a very strong showing for AMD Ryzen Mobile, which is roughly 70 percent faster than Intel 8th Gen in this test.
GRID Autosport - DX11 Racing Action
GRID Autosport is based on a newer DX11 game engine versus Far Cry 2 (DX10) and is perhaps more relevant as a result. Again, historically it has also been tuned to run on Intel HD graphics with an Intel badge prominent on the opening splash screen of the game. We're not sure how optimized it is, however, with a game title from 2014 that can't even hit playable frame rates at 1080p on a current generation chip from 3 years in the future. But we digress; once again AMD's Ryzen 5 2500U blows past Intel UHD Graphics with roughly a 60 percent performance advantage. The same can be said for the NVIDIA discrete MX150 versus Ryzen Mobile's Vega 8 IGP, but with a dedicated 2GB GDDR5 frame buffer it stands to reason.
Middle Earth: Shadow Of War
Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of War, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at its lower quality settings. We tested the game on the HP Envy x360 with Ryzen 5 at 1080p at various image quality levels to see what kind of performance the chip's integrated Vega-based graphic engine could muster in this recently released title...
We don't have comparison data with this newer title from other notebooks, but wanted to show how Ryzen 5 Mobile with its Vega 8 graphics core performed in this game nonetheless. At the High image quality preset, Ryzen 5 could only muster 22 frames per second, which we couldn't consider playable. Dialing back the image quality to the Medium preset boosted performance significantly to over 30 FPS, without sacrificing much in terms of image quality. Cranking things all the way back increase performance about another 10%.
Middle Earth: Shadow Of War
Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of War, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at its lower quality settings. We tested the game on the HP Envy x360 with Ryzen 5 at 1080p at various image quality levels to see what kind of performance the chip's integrated Vega-based graphic engine could muster in this recently released title...
We don't have comparison data with this newer title from other notebooks, but wanted to show how Ryzen 5 Mobile with its Vega 8 graphics core performed in this game nonetheless. At the High image quality preset, Ryzen 5 could only muster 22 frames per second, which we couldn't consider playable. Dialing back the image quality to the Medium preset boosted performance significantly to over 30 FPS, without sacrificing much in terms of image quality. Cranking things all the way back increase performance about another 10%.
