AMD E350 is a little powerhouse

[Aury]

So I had a skyrim-off between my E350 HTPC (Radeon HD 6310) running at 1024x768 and my i5 2410M (Intel HD3000 graphics) running at 1366x768.

Specs were:
E350 dualcore @ 1.6Ghz, 4GB DDR3 ram 1333Mhz 9-9-9-28, Radeon HD 6310 (built into the E350 APU) 1GB ram reserved for graphics, windows 8 (dev)

i5 2410M dualcore (+HT) @ 2.33Ghz (up to 2.7Ghz turbo), 6GB DDR3 ram 1600Mhz 9-9-9-28, Intel HD3000 (built into the i5) 1.5GB ram reserved for graphics, windows 7

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In-game accessible settings were the same, though the system-wide 3D settings applied were different (mostly in the i5's favor, interestingly enough [lowering quality])

Playability-wise, the E350 system completely trounced the i5 system - gameplay was smooth and stutterless, even in combat. The i5 laptop I found was usually fine when simply walking around with no other NPCs, but would become grating and slow the moment the combat AI started up. This probably also speaks a good amount about the improvements made in windows 8 in terms of performance. Now if only they had windows 7.5: windows 7, but with the perf & explorer shell improvements of windows 8. Still, the E350 and the i5 are in /completely/ different leagues, so I was rather surprised that the i5 was left in the dust by the E350 in the computational part of the game, even if it was given the aid of a more efficient OS. FPS also lagged on the i5 system, which I didn't experience on the E350 system - that was a clear victory for the E350 that can't arguably have been aided by the OS.

The E350's performance didn't come without a price; some translucent textures experienced flickering, uncharacteristic quality degradation, or simply failed to show. However, I believe this is a driver issue; I've had similar experiences with the nvidia beta drivers for my workstation's 460s just seconds before they experienced a crash. Also, due to a compatibility glitch with the dev. version of windows 8, the game failed to output audio, so I had to turn on subtitles.

The i5 was given the handicaps of very low texture quality settings, as well as equally low draw distances, but, to put it simply, FPS sucked. Outdoor environments were ok, but the fortress-type dungeons really destroyed the FPS, making looking around very annoying to do because of how slow the system would respond. Maybe the intel drivers just really suck or something. I'm also not sure what was causing it to suck so badly with the combat AI.

In luminous, it scored 38 seconds vs. the E350's 109.9 seconds ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... li=1#gid=0 ). Cinebench widened the gap, giving the E350 a mere .65 and the i5 a 2.58

As for the graphics cards, the Intel HD3000 scored 9.37 while the Radeon HD6310 scored 8.44 in the Cinebench openGL test. (For reference, a 460GT got a 44.52 using the 290 beta drivers)

Later, I'm going to need to test out performance on an A-8 APU.

[Aury]

Update: Got the audio working on the E350. I also updated to the latest drivers, and they reduced the number of flickering transparent textures, but glitchy textures still pop up now and then.