Notebook Gaming With AMD’s Ryzen APU

 

For gamers, the return to form of AMD this year was the biggest news in the hardware space for over a decade. The last time we saw true performance products from the outfit was more than a decade ago when it released its Athlon platform to critical acclaim. Now though, we’ve got Ryzen, a CPU which seems to tick practically all the boxes – perhaps except for gaming performance on the desktop.

 

On laptop, however, it looks like it’s going to be a different story. Earlier this year, the company announced that it would be releasing its new Ryzen architecture laptop APUs in the third quarter – all-in-one chips that it says will revolutionize the way we game on the move according to digitaltrends.com.

 

 

If we’re honest, the offerings from Nvidia up until this point has been pretty disappointing. It’s not uncommon to drop well over $1,000 on a gaming laptop, especially if you opt for one of the high-end mobile GPUs. And yet, the performance is still a little lackluster compared to the desktop, thanks to the thermal constraints on the cards. Mobile GPUs just aren’t as exciting as their bigger, faster brothers.

 

But AMD’s new Ryzen APUs are the first that will ship with the Vega architecture, the company’s newest. While Vega didn’t quite match Nvidia’s Pascal on the efficiency front, it is hoped that when it releases later this year in laptops, it’ll provide a stepwise change in performance, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the launch of the 8800 GTX back in 2008.

 

If AMD did pull the cat out of the bag and produce a gaming laptop that ended up being highly rated on laptop.review, then it probably wouldn’t surprise most seasoned gamers. We’ve gotten used to the fact that AMD makes industry-leading APUs, and so any deviation from that trajectory would be a surprise. But this launch feels different. AMD is a reinvigorated company with a new mission. For the first time in years, it’s making products that people actually aspire to and want to buy, And the new mobile platform it’s created looks like it’s going to be industry-beating.

 

 

The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Mark Papermaster, has predicted as much. He says that with Ryzen on board, the new notebooks powered by the company’s technology will be able to play AAA titles in 1080p at silky-smooth refresh rates.

 

Whether the predictions will hold true remains to be seen. Back at the beginning of the year, AMD showcased their new Vega architecture playing Doom. The demo showed the card rivaled the fastest single GPU in the world, the Nvidia 1080 ti. But closer inspection of the cards, post-launch, revealed that they weren’t as fast as many people had hoped and that they were an upper-mid-range competitor to Nvidia and not the new top dog.

 

 

With that said, what AMD has achieved over the last couple of years has been stunning. Ryzen processors have 50 percent more performance per watt than the company’s previous generation chips. What’s more, the GPU performance is around 40 percent higher. As a result, we’re likely to see some gaming laptops with bite.