AMD Fusion Hits Retail: Zotac and Gigabyte E-350s

Name: AMD Fusion Hits Retail: Zotac and Gigabyte E-350s - Page 6
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 09:00 AM EDT

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Left 4 Dead 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and a full test with 3DMark Vantage. When testing low-power platforms with L4D2 or ET:QW, we dialed things in to moderate to maximum resolutions for the LCD panel that was available in each test case. Since these are more entry-level game tests on highly mobile platforms, we left anti-aliasing turned off and image quality settings set from moderate to high levels where possible.

3D Gaming: Vantage, ET: Quake Wars and Left 4 Dead 2

Testing Zacate's GPU

These scores were recored using 3DMark Vantage's "Entry" level preset. As you can see, the Zotac and Gigabyte E-350 APU-based configurations finished well ahead of all of the competition.

The results in our custom in-game tests were mixed. First off, note the huge performance increase for the Zotac and Gigabyte E-350-based systems versus AMD's reference platform in the OpenGL ET:QW test. AMD seems to have made some major progress with driver optimization, as now, with the most recent Catalyst drivers, the E-350's integrated Radeon HD 6310 GPU finished only a few frames per second behind NVIDIA's next-gen Ion, whereas before it was completely blown out of the water. In the DirectX L4D test, performance is also up slightly and the Zotac and Gigabyte systems outpace the competition at all of the resolutions we tested.

Tags: AMD, Gigabyte, Zotac, Fusion, APU, ZBox HD

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com