AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS iGPU in the game test

– Although the integrated graphics unit of the mobile Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" continues to use Vega and at most even fewer shaders, the performance increases significantly. And that applies not only to the comparison of the Ryzen 9 4900HS with 35 watts TDP to old U models with 15 watts, but also to Picasso with 65 watts for AM4.

In the first test of the Ryzen 9 4900HS at the beginning of the week, the iGPU together with the eight Zen-2 cores was able to show more than 60 percent more power compared to a Ryzen 7 3700U with 25 percent more shaders (604 instead of 512), the TDP of the U-CPU However, it was significantly lower at 15 watts. Renoir is undoubtedly benefiting from the new 7 nm production, the Zen 2 cores and the faster connected working memory. But the more than twice as high TDP distorted the picture.

Renoir with 35 watts against Picasso with 65 watts

At the end of the week, the editorial team therefore provides the answer to the question "How does the newcomer do against 65-watt desktop CPUs?" after. BitcoinMinersHashrate has selected four games that come from the twelve-part benchmark test series that has been running for weeks and were easy to transfer from home office to home office: Counter-Strike: GO, Destiny 2, Fortnite and Overwatch. Since explicit settings for iGPUs have already been used in these articles and current desktop APUs of the Picasso type with 65 W TDP have been tested, the series forms a perfect basis for answering the question.

For the test, BitcoinMinersHashrate originally wanted to use the latest AMD Adrenaline 20.4.1 (download), but Renoir cannot handle it yet. AMD has released an additional graphics card driver this week, which is explicitly for the new Ryzen 4000 from the mobile sector.

The ROG Zephyrus G14 has an end of 512 MB

There was and still is a clear limitation, which can already be seen on the screenshot of the driver, when evaluating the benchmarks: The test device was still the Asus Zephyrus G14 provided by AMD, which alongside the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS was one Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q owns. This can be deactivated, then only the integrated graphics will work. However, in the specific case always only 512 MB of memory of the 16 GB DDR4-3200-RAM in dual-channel configuration is provided. It does not adapt dynamically, as was supposed a few days ago. To what extent this is the decision of the OEM or AMD has not yet been clarified. Previously, APUs could be set up to 2,048 MB. That should continue to be the case, but is generally not necessary for a notebook with a dedicated GPU.

512 MB of graphics memory is little, even in the tested applications. Fortnite, for example, was completely out of memory, the trees were "hidden" and the result was definitely distorted. The other benchmarks showed no visible cuts, but the test result could still have been affected.

Notebooks that are only equipped with an AMD APU without an additional discrete GPU should, as before, offer the option to adapt the video memory used – this is usually possible in the BIOS. The AMD desktop APUs (3400G, 2200G, 3000G) included in the comparison were measured, for example, at a fixed 1024 MByte.

Fortnite is no longer included in the following benchmarks for the reasons mentioned, but Counter-Strike: GO, Destiny 2 and Overwatch are also sufficient to underpin the positive image of the performance of the Renoir iGPU at 35 watts TDP.

The AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS with Vega8 graphics unit is up to 18 percent faster than an AMD Ryzen 3400G with Vega11 – and that despite 35 watts against 65 watts TDP. Compared to the Vega8 in the Ryzen 3 2200G, the advantage is up to 50 percent with the same TDP gradient.

These findings support the consideration of the first test, which can attest the new generation a significant increase in performance. Because offering almost more power at almost half TDP sets a whole new benchmark in terms of efficiency at AMD. How much influence the iGPU, the faster RAM, Zen 2 or the structure of Renoir has in detail cannot be determined from the data collected so far.

The result, however, is clear: casual gaming on integrated GPUs is becoming increasingly socially acceptable and Renoir is making obsolete other current small, discrete graphics cards: Radeon RX 550 and GeForce GT 1030 do not always offer more performance in games, even with a fast desktop CPU.

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