IGP Performance
When testing StarCraft II with medium quality settings at 1280x800, the A8-3850 rendered 45fps – three frames behind the Core i7 2600K. When we bumped that up to DDR3-1866 memory, the A8-3850 reaped another 9fps, which breaks down to 20% more performance. That dipped to 38fps when playing at 1680x1050, but still exceeded the results delivered by Intel's Sandy Bridge IGP.
The A8-3850's performance in Resident Evil 5 was incredible. At 1280x800 the A8-3850 (DDR3-1333) averaged 69fps, making it 53% faster than the Core i7 2600K, which was previously the fastest IGP we tested. Using DDR3-1866 resulted in a 17% performance gain, making the A8-3850 a whopping 80% faster than the Core i7 2600K at 81fps – again, we're talking about integrated graphics here!
The Battlefield: Bad Company 2 results were equally impressive, with the AMD A8-3850 averaging 49fps with DDR3-1333, making it 44% faster than the Core i7 2600K. Again, the speedier RAM boosted performance significantly, granting the A8-3850 an average of 59fps – 74% faster than the i7 2600K.
Unsurprisingly, that dominance continued when testing Far Cry 2: the A8-3850 averaged 67fps to 77fps depending on the RAM frequency, which was 26% to 45% faster than the Core i7 2600K.