Organized competitive gaming has grown exponentially over the last few years. Its rise is marked by professional teams and rousing tournaments watched by millions, and it can be difficult even for the uninitiated to ignore the excitement on display. It's that scene AMD is hoping to win over with this morning's launch of a new flagship APU, the $137 A10-7870K, which has been designed to play the most popular e-sports titles at high performance for a low cost.
The A10-7870K features four CPU cores running at 3.9 GHz and can reach a frequency of 4.1 GHz with Turbo Boost. The integrated Radeon R7 graphics chip houses eight cores for a GPU frequency of 866 MHz. It utilizes DDR3-2133 MHz memory up to 2400 MHz via AMD memory profiles. Additionally, the A10-7870K is an unlocked APU, allowing overclocking of the memory, CPU, and GPU. And because it leverages existing FM2+ socket motherboards, upgrading is made easy.
The A10-7870K ships with a host of other features. Its CPU and GPU can share data more efficiently without the need to copy that data between discrete processing units thanks to a heterogeneous system architecture. Microsoft's DirectX 12 and AMD's own API, Mantle, are supported. We were impressed by the framerate gains seen in our own benchmarks of Mantle, and DirectX 12 should present equivalent results.
AMD's adaptive sync and Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) technologies are also supported. The former, FreeSync, eliminates screen tearing and V-sync associated stutter when paired with a compatible display. Many of us don't have the latest, high resolution gaming monitors, however, making VSR a welcome solution. When enabled, VSR can render a game above the screen's native resolution. The benefits are a sharper image and less aliasing.
But how do those figures translate into real world performance? AMD's provided 1920×1080 resolution benchmarks utilizing 8 GB of DDR3-2400 MHz memory put the A10-7870K up against two different Intel configurations. Against an Intel i5 4460, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 4xAA, 16xAF, and ultra settings reached a framerate of 62 on the A10-7870K versus 19.5 from Intel. DOTA 2's numbers on its ultra preset were 49 versus 25. StarCraft 2 at 4xAA, 8xAF, and ultra settings ran at 35 frames on the AMD APU and 19 on Intel's i5. Finally, Grand Theft Auto 5 saw similar numbers on its normal preset with 33 frames and 18 frames respectively.
The second set of benchmarks compared the A10-7870K to an Intel i3 4370 paired with an Nvidia GeForce 730 graphics card. The AMD A10's Counter-Strike and DOTA 2 framerates were again nearly double that of the Intel configuration (61.5 versus 33.9; 49.1 versus 24.7). We should stress again that these benchmarks were provided by AMD. We did not have samples on hand to verify those tests.
According to AMD, the A10-7870K can make intelligent use of a discrete graphics card without affecting latency nor introducing stutter. Another set of benchmarks showed the APU by itself running the recently launched Dirty Rally at 1920×1080 and medium settings around 40 frames per second. Coupled with a Radeon R7 250, the game was able to hit 45 frames at the high graphical preset.
AMD is promising a lot with their new flagship APU: amazing performance, a smooth online experience, and easy upgrades. If their benchmarks are accurate, then the affordable A10-7870K may be an ideal component for a portable LAN machine or system designed for today's hottest, competitive games.
