Gaming Performance
Now that we have looked at the synthetics, let us dive into gaming. This section is going to be rather long because we have 16 games to cover. This will give you a good idea of what the gaming experience is like on this integrated GPU. Since we have so many games to cover we will cover multiple games on each page, instead of one game per page.
Red Dead Redemption 2
The first game we tested was Red Dead Redemption 2, it is new, but also very demanding. We did get an error when launching the game though every time as shown above. We could still click ok and go into the game. The game runs in the Vulkan API. We used the built-in benchmark.
We are only showing one resolution of performance in this game because it performed so poorly here. Even at the lowest resolution possible, 720p, plus the lowest in-game settings possible we averaged 15 FPS. This is just not playable in this game. This performance level renders the game unplayable on the Ryzen 5 3500U with Vega 8. It just isn’t possible to play this game at all at the lowest settings and resolution.
Metro Exodus
Next up is Metro Exodus, another very tough game graphically speaking. We used the “Low” preset which does enable 4X AF, but otherwise everything is at the lowest setting and or turned off. We did run this game in DX12. We used the built-in benchmark.
You can see here that at 720p we start out at 22 FPS, then it is near 19 FPS at 900p and finally 15 FPS at 1080p. This also is not playable, even at 720p. It’s not a good experience.
The only way to make this game playable is to use the Shading Rate option and set it to 50%. What this basically does is cut the rendering resolution in-half. By doing this the game’s performance went up to 27.4 FPS and was more tolerable. However, it doesn’t take much for that performance to tank to 20 FPS and ruin the experience. Plus, 50% shading rate looks terrible in terms of resolution.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint
The next game up is Ghost Recon Breakpoint. This game is a little easier on the graphics, though we did choose the “Low” preset in the game which sets the lowest settings. We used the built-in benchmark. This game runs in DX11.
At 720p it averages 25 FPS, which is borderline acceptable in this game. At 900p it drops to 19 FPS and at 1080p 16 FPS.
The Division 2
In The Division 2 we set the lowest preset game settings and the game runs in DX12. We used the built-in benchmark test.
At 720p it actually pulls in an average of 35 FPS and is playable. This is the best performance shown yet. This game is well optimized for AMD GPUs. At 900p it averages 28 FPS and 1080p is 21 FPS.