There is a lot of hype surrounding the next-gen desktop APUs from AMD. That's because the company is finally moving over from Vega integrated graphics to RDNA 2 and faster DDR5 memory is also making an entry to help out. As such, performance rumors for the RDNA 2 APU have been extremely bullish with leakers suggesting RTX 3060 Max-Q levels of performance with slightly more conservative estimates pitching it on par with GTX 1060.
However, in what appears to be some early benchmark runs for a 5.2+GHz 8 core 16 thread AMD Ryzen RDNA 2 desktop APU engineering sample, the chip has put up a disappointing show. Compared to the performance of the last-gen Ryzen 7 5700G flagship desktop APU, the scores obtained by the AMD Engineering sample are average at best. The RDNA 2 graphics portion of the chip appears to have the codename "GFX1036".
 Test Setup |
 Test Results |
Here's how it compared to the Vega 8 on the Ryzen 5700G (via Phoronix):
| Vega 8 in Ryzen 7 5700G | RDNA 2 APU GFX1036 | |
|---|---|---|
| Unigine Valley 1.0 (1080p) | 29.72 fps | ~9 fps |
| Tesseract 2014-05-12 (1080p) | 187.26 fps | 63.1 fps |
| Tesseract 2014-05-12 (2160p) | -- | 63 |
While we don't have the 4K Tesseract score for the Vega 8, the result for the GFX1036 RDNA 2 IGP is interesting in itself as it suggests that there is some sort of bottleneck on the RDNA 2 system which is why both the 1080p and the 2160p (4K) scores are nearly identical.
This indicates a lot of optimization still remains to be done for the Ryzen RDNA 2 APU at least on Ubuntu 20.04, where it was tested. In fact, there could be some really big gains to be had as recent testing showed very positive results for Ryzen 4000 APUs on Ubuntu 22.04 when compared against 20.04. Linux 5.16 also leads to significant gains for AMD's Ryzen APUs.
Source and images: OpenBenchmarking via Petykemano (Twitter)
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