AMD Kaveri APU A10-7850K Gaming and General Performance Unveiled – Mantle 45% Faster Than DirectX

In addition to the technical slides, PurePC also leaked the performance slides of AMD’s Kaveri APU which gives a glimpse at the general application and gaming performance along with some numbers with Mantle API in action. The AMD A10 series lineup for 2014 will launch on 14th January 2014, initially introducing two products – AMD A10-7850K and A10-7700K.

AMD Kaveri APU A10-7850K Gaming Performance Unveiled

The AMD Kaveri APU architecture has already been explained in the previous article so need to talk about it in detail except the fact that AMD’s 2014 APU lineup will feature the Steamroller core architecture and GCN core for graphics. The APUs would be the first consumer product to support HUMA which provides a unified coherent memory access to the GPU and CPU.

First of all there are are performance numbers regarding the A10-7850K which compared to the Core i5-4670K delivers faster gaming performance with the on-die graphics chip. In general, we are comparing the Radeon R7 graphics chip with the HD 4000 graphics Intel has integrated on their Haswell CPUs. Since Radeon R7 series has an arch structure similar to the one found on GCN based Hawaii GPU, it performs much better than the Intel HD solution and supports technologies such as Mantle API, AMD TrueAudio, DirectX 11.2 and OpenGL 4.4. The slide showcasing the gaming performance shows improvements upto 91% at 1080P resolution which is a great deal for a budget CPU that is going to cost just a little over the $150 mark ($173 US Official MSRP).
There are also some performance numbers with the Radeon R9 270X which seems to be the perfect partner of the Kaveri APU bringing much greater performance at a price of $199 US. It is not known which graphics cards support Dual graphics functionality with the Kaveri APU but we have seen the DMA engine on board the Kaveri die so it will offer improved CrossFire (dual graphics) scaling with supported cards as seen with the Hawaii GPU. Some general benchmark numbers are posted below showcasing performance of different TDP based Kaveri solutions versus Richland:

3DMark Firestrike

95W Kaveri – 1541 Marks
95W Richland – 1125 Marks
65W Kaveri – 1304 Marks
65W Richland - 984 Marks
45W Kaveri – 1287 Marks
45W Richland – 735 Marks

Next up, we have some battery performance numbers of a 35W Kaveri mobile APU with 4 GB memory showing some impressive on-life numbers for the mobile 2014 APU series.

AMD Mantle API is 45% Faster Than DirectX

Last but not least, we also have an update on the performance of AMD’s Mantle API which is mentioned to be 45% faster than DirectX. The Oxide demo with A8-7600 APU runs below 10 FPS in DirectX mode but reaches past 30 FPS with Mantle API which is a huge gain and something we could expect in Battlefield 4 when the update arrives this month. There are some good performance numbers below which you might want to check since many people have been asking for more credible, official and legitimate numbers regarding the Kaveri APU and the wait is finally over.

Model	AMD A10-7850K	AMD A10-7700K	AMD A10-7800	AMD A8-7600	AMD A6-7400K	AMD A4-7300
Cores	4/4	4/4	4/4	4/4	2/2	2/2
Unlocked Design	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Base Clock	3.7 GHz	3.4 GHz	3.5 GHz	3.1 GHz	TBA	3.4 GHz
Turbo Clock	4.0 GHz	3.8 GHz	3.9 GHz	3.8 GHz	TBA	3.8 GHz
HSA Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
L2 Cache	4 MB	4 MB	4 MB	4 MB	1 MB	1 MB
Graphics Core	Radeon R7	Radeon R7	Radeon R7	Radeon R7	Radeon R5	Radeon R5
Compute Units	8	6	8	6	4	3
GPU Cores	512	384	512	384	256	192
GPU Clock	720 MHz	720 MHz	720 MHz	720 MHz	TBA	514 MHz
TDP	95W	95W	65W	65W	65W	65W
Price	$173 US	$152 US	$172 US	$119 US	TBA	TBA