AMD claims the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is 75% faster than Intel's Core Ultra 7 258V in gaming

AMD has published a blog post boasting of incredible gaming performance for its Ryzen AI 300 series processors, with performance that is on average 75% faster than Intel's equivalent Lunar Lake counterpart. That number doesn't agree with our own testing of the Radeon 890M and Arc 140V integrated graphics, in part because we didn't use "performance enhancing" settings that are inherently unequal.

AMD unveiled several gaming benchmarks at 1080p medium settings, showcasing the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with Radeon 890M significantly outperforming Intel's competing Core Ultra 7 258V with Arc 140V graphics. Games selected for the comparison included Ghost of Tsushima, Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Baldur's Gate 3, Spider-Man Remastered, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hogwarts Legacy, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Borderlands 3, Doom Eternal, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, Forza Horizon 5, Hitman 3, Far Cry 6, and F1 24.

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On average, AMD touts a 75% performance lead for its Radeon 890M powered Zen 5 mobile chip. For example, in Black Ops 6, the HX 370 generated an average frame rate of 99. The 258V, by contrast, held an equivalent frame rate of just 48. It sounds good, until you look at the specifics of the testing.

AMD is taking advantage of all its software performance boosters to yield these impressive gains. This includes using both FSR 3 upscaling as well as FSR 3 frame generation, and in games that don't support FSR 3, AFMF 2 driver-based frame generation is applied as a substitute. HYPR-RX was also enabled for games that support it, which will enable one or more of: Anti-Lag, AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 (AFMF2), Radeon Super Resolution (RSR), Radeon Boost, and/or FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). RSR and AFMF2 work via AMD's drivers to enable frame generation and spatial upscaling (FSR1) for games that don't have native support upscaling/framegen, while Radeon Boost dynamically lowers the render resolution when fast motion is detected.

For the Intel counterparts, AMD uses Intel's competing XeSS solution for comparison, as well as FSR in cases where XeSS isn't present. But it's important to note that XeSS doesn't have any type of frame generation functionality, which inevitably skews the results in favor of AMD. Also, we've seen in the past the FSR3 runs better on AMD's GPUs than on competitors' GPUs, which makes sense, but also results in non-equal workloads.

AMD also showcased the native performance of both processors without any upscale or frame generation enabled. In this software environment, the AMD Radeon 890M-equipped CPU was pushing virtually identical frame rates, on average, compared to the Arc 140V-equipped Intel counterpart. The Core Ultra 7 258V outperformed the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in several games, including Black Ops 6 and Hitman 3. But AMD didn't provide any exact framerate statistics for the native performance figures, merely showing a bar graph visual and making it impossible to define clearly how much faster or slower the 258V was against the HX 370.

Like any manufacturer provided benchmarks, take the 75% performance uplift headline claim with a large helping of salt. While gamers can choose to enable such technologies, using them to compare performance can heavily skew the results. For the CPU world, it would be like running Cinebench but only rendering a quarter of the pixels and then using a denoising algorithm versus a competitor that has to fully render every pixel.

What AMD is advertising is a potential 75% performance uplift by using software techniques to reduce the graphics workload and boost performance. But without that extra software, AMD's own numbers show its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 performs on par with Intel's Core Ultra 7 258V. That mostly matches our own testing, which gave Intel's GPU a 6.7% lead overall at 720p and a 5.5% lead at 1080p.