ASUS ROG Flow Z13 Review: AMD Strix Halo Is A Potent Beast

It's time for more benchmarks on the ROG Flow Z13 and its Ryzen AI MAX+ 395's integrated Radeon 8060S graphics. First, we're going to run 3DMark, as per usual. After that, we'll look at a couple of relatively lightweight older game benchmarks before checking out a few more demanding tests, and lastly we'll do some more subjective discussion of the gaming experience on this machine.

UL 3DMark Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks

3DMark has a wide variety of graphics and gaming related tests available, and usually, we prefer to run lighter tests on integrated GPUs or heavier tests on more powerful discrete GPUs, given the capabilities of the machine in question. However, considering that the ROG Flow Z13 sort-of straddles the line between "thin & light" and "core gaming," we really wanted to compare against as many data points as we could. To that end, we ran four separate 3DMark tests.

First, we chose to run 3DMark Night Raid. This is a modern DirectX 12 test specifically for mobile platforms with integrated graphics.


Night Raid is a very lightweight test meant for integrated graphics like those you would find on a PC from six or seven years ago. Despite also being "integrated graphics", the Radeon 8060S in the Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 absolutely demolishes all comers—but keep in mind that there are very few (and no recent) discrete GPUs among the competition. We'll get to that in a minute.

Wild Life Extreme is a much more demanding cross-platform benchmark that taxes the system heavily with ultra-high-resolution rendering in native 4K. While the test scene isn't that demanding, the high resolution puts a heavy load on the memory subsystem, and so this sort of becomes a memory test more than anything.


Given that the Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 has the biggest GPU, an optimized driver, and the most memory bandwidth out of everything in this test, it's no real surprise that it comes out smelling like roses. It nearly triples the performance of the next-highest x86 result, and where the MacBook Pro's M2 processor was previously predominant in this test, it gets leapfrogged easily by the admittedly much-newer AMD chip.

How about some real competition? We dug into our gaming notebook data to pull out some much tougher targets for the ROG Flow Z13 to compare against. First up is the venerable but still-difficult Fire Strike Extreme DirectX 11 benchmark:


To be clear, this is not a bad result—remember, this is still integrated graphics we're talking about, and it is basically keeping up with a GeForce RTX 4070 and a Radeon RX 6800S. Still, it goes to show that as impressive as the Radeon 8060S is, it's really only a match for a mid-range mobile GPU. Note also the humongous variance in mobile GeForce RTX 4070 performance; mobile GPUs are as much about power and thermal limits as they are about what core configuration they have, and notebooks vary significantly in how they configure dGPU power limits.


We see the same thing in the newer Time Spy DirectX 12 benchmark, where the Radeon 8060S holds its own against mobile GeForce RTX 4070 cards and is in striking distance of a potent GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. A desktop-style machine with one of these processors inside could be a real gaming powerhouse with extremely compact dimensions.

F1 22 Formula One Racing Benchmarks

Now, granted that racing simulator F1 2022 is getting a bit long in the tooth, but it can be surprisingly sensitive to certain system configurations, so we enjoy using it as a test as it can really tease out some peculiar performance characteristics. It helps that we have lots of performance data for it too. We tested the game on its High graphics preset at 1080p resolution with upscaling disabled.


F1 22, being both a bit older and also being tested on relatively modest settings (1080p resolution, High preset instead of Ultra High) to match our test data on the other machines, absolutely screams on the ROG Flow Z13. We test the game this way to give a fair challenge to integrated graphics, and while the graphics on this system are certainly integrated, they're a whole other class of product from the others here.

Gears Tactics Strategy Game Benchmarks

Similarly, 2020's Gears Tactics still makes an excellent benchmark for normal integrated graphics. It's a tightly-optimized Unreal Engine title with a highly-configurable built-in benchmark that provides a wealth of performance data after each run. We tested it on High, Medium, and Low presets at 1920×1080 resolution, just as we have done for the other systems.


Surprisingly, we're only coming in slightly ahead of the discrete GPUs on the "High" preset, but cranking the settings down immediately makes us CPU-limited in Gears Tactics. Suffice it to say that the Radeon 8060S really, really isn't in the same performance class as other integrated solutions -- it's much more potent.

Middle-earth Shadow of War Benchmarks

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a fun and beautiful title set in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the visuals to the High preset and tested in both 1080p and 2560×1440. The frame rates here are the average reported by the built-in benchmark.

Just like in 3DMark, in this real game test, we see the ROG Flow Z13 nestled among GeForce RTX 4070 cards. It falls off a little in comparison to most of the competition at 1440p, but 105 FPS in 1440p is nothing to cry about—especially on integrated graphics.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmarks

The finale in the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is easily the best-looking of the bunch. It's also brimming with fancy tech, including for all three vendors' smart upscalers, ray-traced shadows, and even Tobii eye-tracking support. To test this game out, we turned the visuals up to their highest preset and tested at 1080p and 2560x1440.

No real surprises here, either. While a last-place finish in 1440p might be disappointing, the ROG Flow Z13 is offering up very consistent performance with a small margin between its Minimum and Average frame rates.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Benchmarks

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is an action-adventure game where you play as Star-Lord and lead the rest of the Guardians through various missions in a wide variety of galactic locales. The game’s minimum requirements call for a Radeon RX 570 or GeForce GTX 1060-class GPU, but it also supports some of the latest graphics technologies, including DXR and DLSS.

AMD may have some driver optimizations to do on the Ryzen AI MAX's integrated Radeon 8060S GPU. We say that because it seems to take an unusually large hit to frame-time stability when ray-tracing is enabled. The GPU has the grunt to handle this game's ray-traced reflections with ease, but it does seem to hurt the minimums more than the average. The game's playable this way, but we'd probably turn the ray-tracing off to gain back the minimum FPS it loses.

ROG Flow Z13 Subjective Gaming Experience Thoughts

AMD's emphasis when it announced the "Strix Halo" parts as the Ryzen AI MAX series processors was almost completely on the productivity and business side of the product. The company was very eager to note that it offers capabilities that nothing else in the consumer market does—when paired with a large local memory of 64GB or more, you can run extremely large AI models on a mobile device like this, something that no discrete GPU will let you do. However, the product we're featuring here is a "ROG" product. That's "Republic of Gamers," just in case you've forgotten. Indeed, "Radeon" means "gaming" and that's what we spent the majority of our time with the ROG Flow Z13 doing.


What we found was a surprisingly smooth experience with just a few sore spots. Truly demanding games, like Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Dragon's Dogma 2, are completely playable on the ROG Flow Z13. In some cases, you'll want to use upscaling, particularly in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, but the Radeon 8060S is capable of handling the native 2560×1600 resolution in way more games than we would have expected. It's honestly quite surprising considering that the GPU has to share its 256 GB/second memory bus with sixteen thirsty Zen 5 CPU cores.


Like any integrated GPU, performance is bottlenecked by that memory bandwidth and you'll gain a lot by using upscaling or simply slashing the resolution in whatever game. Still, as we noted, we did run into some bumps on the road. Cyberpunk 2077 in particular doesn't like this machine very much. It's not even about the ray-tracing features either, since simply setting the game to "Ultra" requires the application of considerable upscaling to maintain playable performance. This was surprising because Cyberpunk 2077 does relatively well on RDNA 3 discrete GPUs, so it's possible that our driver is missing the latest optimizations. Dragon's Dogma 2 actually ran more smoothly, as did Hogwarts Legacy, which actually runs flawlessly even with the ray-tracing settings maxed out.


In fact, ray-tracing really isn't a problem for this machine, for the most part. You see, the GPU is so big and so bottlenecked by memory bandwidth that the extra compute required by ray-tracing is usually no problem at all. Enabling ray-tracing in the pre-release Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark barely cut performance by around 5%, and enabling it in Dragon's Dogma 2 made no difference whatsoever to performance—but drastically improved the ambient occlusion effect. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, infamous for its absolute ray-tracing requirement, also runs great on this system, albeit with upscaling from 1080p.


Overall, AMD seems to have done a lot of optimization work on Unreal Engine titles—or perhaps Epic has targeted Radeons with its engine upgrades. Either way, popular Unreal Engine games, like Fortnite, Hogwarts Legacy, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and Rocket League all run beautifully on the ROG Flow Z13. One exception is the Game Science title Black Myth: Wukong. Despite being based on Unreal Engine 5, this game actually runs rather poorly on the ROG Flow Z13. BM:W is well-acknowledged in the community to favor GeForce GPUs, though -- perhaps we just have to chalk this one up to vendor optimizations.


Most people are probably going to be pleasantly surprised by the prowess of the Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 and its integrated Radeon 8060S GPU, especially as implemented in the ROG Flow Z13. Because of the variable-refresh-rate display, frame rates that probably sound low are actually acceptably smooth. This is especially true considering that, thanks to the immense CPU horsepower behind the GPU, in-game frame times are usually quite stable. It's not wrong to compare the gaming performance of the ROG Flow Z13 to a gaming laptop equipped with a GeForce RTX 4070, but you won't find many of those in the 13" size class.

Next up -- power, acoustics and thermals...