Although it's theoretically able to serve up playable frame rates across our entire benchmark suite (at the right resolution and settings, of course), AMD's Radeon HD 7660D integrated graphics processor wasn't designed to compete against the company's own discrete GPUs. That usually means choosing between higher graphics quality or resolutions.
In 3DMark, the limitations of integrated graphics mean using the Entry preset. And as you can see, memory bandwidth has a big impact on this synthetic's overall score.

Stepping up to 3DMark’s Performance preset generally imposed a slide show upon us. Nevertheless, the terrible frame rate was still sped up slightly by faster system memory.

We're putting Aliens Vs. Predator on the same page as 3DMark, since I'm using the benchmark version of this utility. It's still based on a real game though, so we're including the numbers from this one in our overall gaming performance chart.

AvP exhibits huge performance gains favoring higher memory data rates at the most entry-level settings. Unfortunately, those image quality presets look pretty awful compared to other, more modern titles.

Still devoid of luscious graphics, but with far fewer jagged edges, enabling anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in AvP knocks AMD's APU to its knees. We get playable performance at 1280x720, but you'll probably want at least DDR3-1866 to help performance as much as possible.
- Memory Scaling On AMD's Trinity Architecture
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Results: 3DMark And Aliens Vs. Predator
- Results: Battlefield 3 And F1 2012
- Battlefield 3, Frame By Frame
- Results: Skyrim And StarCraft II
- Power, Average Performance, And Efficiency
- When Does Spending 50% More Become A Great Value?
Right there. An APU is not a top-tier gamer, so incremental improvement really matters. I could not care less about going from 60FPS to 80FPS, but 30FPS to 40FPS, the same relative improvement, is a really big deal.
Oh you are so close yet so far to knowing what you're talking about...
You would be well served to learn about the Von Neumann architecture and more precisely the Von Neumann bottleneck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture
The biggest bottleneck in any architecture is shared communication between all components, data throughput is crucial to all parts of a system; yet beyond that latency of components in relation to bandwidth is the real Achilles heel of the computer and THAT is why CPUs have L1/L2/L3 cache so that they can have ultra low latency memory that is usually around 1.5/5/7.5ns respectively. When you have that low latency combined with a bandwidth of what is 76000/44000/22000 MB/s compared to normal DDR3-1600 on sandy/ivy bridge you have a system that appears to not be bottlenecked by RAM. As for a Trinity AMD system, the reason why one sees such massive gains when going up in RAM speeds from DDR-3 1600 to 2133 is because the GPU can't get away with the tiny amount of storage that is the L1/L2 cache, it has to have a large interface of 512MB-3GB to crunch the massive amount of parallel data and therefore is limited by the aggregate throughput of the system's memory. Hypothetically, if you were to continue to increase the data rate of the system's memory you would see performance gains up until the point where the GPU's instructions units can no longer make use of the available interface.
Having said all that, until DDR-4 is out we can't say for certain that it will not have a huge impact on both AMD and Intel systems. This is because if DDR-4 manages to lower latency or greatly increase bandwidth you will see gains, especially if DDR-4 is able to achieve both lower latency and higher bandwidth at the same time. Oh and, to correct your first inaccuracy, DDR-4 will be lower power than what is currently available so it will use less electricity than DDR3-2400 therefore providing more performance per Watt of energy used.
The question is ... does the performance with higher speed memory continue to scale as the *SIMD Engine Array* is over-clocked.
Inquiring minds would like to know ...
Right there. An APU is not a top-tier gamer, so incremental improvement really matters. I could not care less about going from 60FPS to 80FPS, but 30FPS to 40FPS, the same relative improvement, is a really big deal.
Individuals who would use faster memory for gaming are likely to want to push their mid/high range card to the limits, do you plan on doing a similar piece for AMD CPUs as you did in the Intel article "Does Memory Performance Bottleneck Your Games?"
Also, I would like to see a Nvidia card at play as well. Maybe a 650 Ti or 660 Ti? In addition, it wold be nice to see the memory scaling difference between AMD and Nvidia GPUs in a single review.
Thanks.
Considering how DDR3-2400 is only a tiny fraction better than DDR3-2133, it's safe to assume memory stops being the bottleneck around that point. DDR4 will not noticeably improve performance or even power consumption as memory consumes almost negligible amounts of electricity to begin with.
It's back to looking at better GPUs and CPUs for better performance.
Bpttleneck hierarchy has always been GPU>CPU>RAM.
The CPU has always been more reliant on the RAM than the GPU but an APU is basically a GPU+CPU in one, so RAM is more important, but as we've seen, only up to DDR3-2133. After that diminishing returns skyrocket.
I didn't know that nVidia made APU's?
The more you know... /rollseyes/
still, 15 gb/s out of ddr3 2400 ram is just sad. i expect amd to improve in the next gen apus. the igpus deserve the extra memory bandwidth.
i wonder how cpu overclocking (along with igpu and ram oc) affect the games like skyrim, starcraft and f1. those seemed more memory sensitive.
Oh you are so close yet so far to knowing what you're talking about...
You would be well served to learn about the Von Neumann architecture and more precisely the Von Neumann bottleneck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture
The biggest bottleneck in any architecture is shared communication between all components, data throughput is crucial to all parts of a system; yet beyond that latency of components in relation to bandwidth is the real Achilles heel of the computer and THAT is why CPUs have L1/L2/L3 cache so that they can have ultra low latency memory that is usually around 1.5/5/7.5ns respectively. When you have that low latency combined with a bandwidth of what is 76000/44000/22000 MB/s compared to normal DDR3-1600 on sandy/ivy bridge you have a system that appears to not be bottlenecked by RAM. As for a Trinity AMD system, the reason why one sees such massive gains when going up in RAM speeds from DDR-3 1600 to 2133 is because the GPU can't get away with the tiny amount of storage that is the L1/L2 cache, it has to have a large interface of 512MB-3GB to crunch the massive amount of parallel data and therefore is limited by the aggregate throughput of the system's memory. Hypothetically, if you were to continue to increase the data rate of the system's memory you would see performance gains up until the point where the GPU's instructions units can no longer make use of the available interface.
Having said all that, until DDR-4 is out we can't say for certain that it will not have a huge impact on both AMD and Intel systems. This is because if DDR-4 manages to lower latency or greatly increase bandwidth you will see gains, especially if DDR-4 is able to achieve both lower latency and higher bandwidth at the same time. Oh and, to correct your first inaccuracy, DDR-4 will be lower power than what is currently available so it will use less electricity than DDR3-2400 therefore providing more performance per Watt of energy used.
RAM Speeds above ddr 1333 does not bottleneck any current CPU in terms of gaming.
Hardly any game gove above 2 GB or ram used so 4 GB is what you need 95% of time you buy 8 GB because it's cheap.
And that's all about memory performance.
That's the main reason why you see a lot of streamers stream at the lowest possible settings which makes game look like crap but provides required fluidity to avoid the frustration of looking at the slideshow in which you can't act and proceed to lose the game.