Better With Time? The A8-3870 And Pentium G630, One Year Later

OpenCL Results: Musemage And vReveal

AMD's A8 starts by trailing Intel's Pentium. However, activating OpenCL puts the Llano-based chip on par with the G630.

We've run vReveal in some of our graphics card stories. The problem there is that we're using very high-end hardware to minimize platform bottlenecks as we benchmark high-end GPUs. As a result, vReveal never has any trouble achieving a smooth 30 FPS.

That's not the case on more mainstream platforms, though. Applying the app's effects drops frame rates into single-digit ranges as each CPU struggles under the workload. Turning on OpenCL gets AMD's SIMDs involved, more than doubling the frame rate. Seventeen frames per second still isn't considered smooth, but you're at least looking at the video output in a more real-time format before applying a final render.