Results: F1 2012 And The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
As far as average frame rates go, All of the APUs are playable at 1920x1080 using Medium quality settings, maintaining at least 30 FPS. As we might have guessed, using system memory running at 2133 MT/s makes an appreciable difference, slightly outpacing the same APU complemented by a discrete Radeon HD 6670.
We knew going in that HD Graphics 2500 would have been unplayable. Intel figured the same thing out quite a while after introducing its modest Core i3-3220; the -3225 didn't become available until quite a while after. The company redeems itself, however, when we drop in the same Radeon HD 6670, though. Alleviating the A10's processor bottleneck allows AMD's add-in card to achieve much higher frame rates.
Charting frame rate over time gives us a clearer look at the peaks and valleys of each solution, though we don't derive any additional insight.
All of our tested configurations exhibit fairly low variance in the time it takes to render one frame to the next. Even when frame rates get slow, then, at least you have this consistency to look forward to.
No surprise; Intel's HD Graphics 2500 implementation isn't cut out for gaming. For that, you'd want to look to HD Graphics 4000, at least.
But even then, data from Chris Angelini's review of Core i7-4770K shows that Intel cannot keep up with AMD's APUs in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It's not even close. HD Graphics 4600 doesn't even do the trick.
Faster memory isn't a huge deal for the AMD parts in this title, though we will note that the 2133 MT/s kit helps A10-6800K outperform Intel's Core i3 complemented by discrete graphics.
The frame rate over time chart shows how 2133 MT/s memory helps push the A10-6800K to the top during this benchmark run.
Unfortunately, playable frame rates don't guarantee smooth performance. When we look at worst-case scenarios, each one of these solutions incurs more than 10 ms of variance between frames. That's definitely a difference you're going to feel as you're playing. And indeed, our experience in Skyrim reflected relatively moderate consistency in how frames are delivered.
