RYZEN 8000 IS HERE** + RX 7600 XT 16GB ANNOUNCED!!
AMD’s Ryzen 8000 series CPUs are here! Well, sort of. As of today, AMD is announcing four Ryzen 8000 series CPUs, although they aren’t really 8000 series chips. These are still Zen4 based, the same as the current 7000 series, but these are the APUs. Technically, all Ryzen 7000 series chips are APUs, as they all contain an integrated GPU, making AMD’s “G” line somewhat irrelevant – that is, until now. AMD is launching the 8700G, 8600G, 8500G, and 8300G. The big deal here is that the integrated GPU is a significant step up from what we’ve had before. The top end 8700G now gets AMD Radeon 780M Graphics, which – at least according to AMD’s own benchmark results – should offer over 60FPS in Cyberpunk on low at 1080p, 89 FPS in Hitman 3, 109 FPS in GTA V, 120 FPS in F1 2022, and 236 FPS in League of Legends on default settings. That’s pretty impressive!
In fact, AMD takes the comparison one step further. They have included results from an i5 13400F and GTX 1650, which they say is a $410 combo right now, versus the 8700G that they say “costs less”. They haven’t released pricing yet, so we can’t evaluate this claim all that well as if it costs, say $409, that’s a lot less impressive than if it costs $250, they just say “less suggested e-tail pricing”. Still, the idea that your CPU can now potentially outperform a moderately performant dedicated GPU is mighty impressive. Considering the GTX 1650 is STILL the second most popular GPU on the Steam Hardware Survey – only behind the RTX 3060 and still significantly ahead of the GTX 1060 – having your CPU potentially outperform that is pretty good. AMD reckons you’ll get slightly more performance in GTA V and Baldur’s Gate 3, although you can expect a decent amount more performance in Starfield, Alan Wake 2 and Star Wars Jedi Survivor. As always, we are going to have to wait for independent benchmarks before we can see how true these claims are, and we’ll also need to know pricing to make it a useful comparison, but it sure looks promising. For those on a really tight budget, picking up one of these chips might actually be a feasible start to building a gaming PC, where you can drop a proper GPU in later once you can afford one. That’s pretty cool.
AMD hasn’t given us much info – here’s the main specs for the chips though, the 8700G is an 8 core, 16 thread part with a boost clock up to 5.1GHz. The 8600G is a 6 core 12 thread part, as is the 8500G, although those get 760M and 740M graphics respectively, and then the 8300G is a system integrator only chip, and is a quad core 8 thread part, so that’s the super low end option. All four chips have a 65W TDP though which is pretty interesting to see. There is one more interesting thing to note with these parts, which AMD sneaks into their CPU table slide at the end here, which is that the 8500G and 8300G use Zen4c cores, as well as standard Zen4 cores. These are generally low-cache variants which means the dies are often much smaller. This should help AMD in manufacturing these chips, as the ever-precious wafer space at TSMC is always limited and expensive. I’ll be interested to see if this means we’ll have two dies in these chips, or if these are custom designed dies just for these chips.
One final thing I want to mention about these APUs is this slide here. AMD claims you can get 61 FPS average in Starfield with the 8700G, a frankly amazing feat, until you realise that they’re including “Fluid Motion Frames” in the count, which essentially doubles your framerate with “fake” frames. Equally, the graph here isn’t scaled to 0. 32 FPS is a third of 61 FPS? This is the sort of deceptive tactics you’ll have to be aware of when looking at manufacturer-provided data. I just thought I’d mention that.
Sticking with the APU theme, I want to briefly mention the results AMD highlights at the start of their presentation, where they compare their newest mobile chip, the 8840U with the same 780M graphics the 8700G is getting, to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H with Arc Graphics. This is especially poignant considering the leaks that MSI’s upcoming Claw handheld will use that Ultra 7 chip – and at least according to AMD, you can expect up to 60% more performance from AMD’s solution. Again, we’ll have to see some independent tests, and this doesn’t take into account TDP and thermal constraints, but I found it rather interesting.
Lastly on the CPU front, we have… well we have deja vu. AMD, and I can’t believe I’m saying this in January 2024, is launching multiple new Ryzen 5000 series chips. Look, see, this says “CES 2024” and “NEW AMD RYZEN 5000 SERIES PROCESSORS FOR AM4”, I’m not dreaming, right? RIGHT? The first new chip is the 5700X3D. I have to assume this is reject 5800X3D dies, but I thought those went into the US-only 5600X3D they sold to Microcenter last year, so I have no idea where these are coming from. At least they include pricing for this one, at $249, which they compare to the 13600K using an RTX 4080 at 1080p on high settings and show up to 13% more performance – although interestingly they only seem to have benchmarked equally old titles – COD Modern Warfare, not Modern Warfare 2 or 3, Watch Dogs Legion, Shadow “iof” the Tomb Raider and Control. That’s really, really weird.
Anyway, we also get a 5700 with included CPU cooler, 5600GT, basically an upgraded GPU on the 5600G, and same for the 5500GT. Here’s the list of all the chips AMD seems to make or support right now. Feel free to pause if you want to peruse the list in your own time. For me though, it’s time to move on to their new GPU.
That would be this, the RX 7600 XT. AMD makes a pretty big stink about this being a 16GB card – and I’d argue quite rightfully. VRAM was one of the hottest topics of discussion in the PC space last year, and it’s hard to argue that NVIDIA specifically has been particularly stingy with VRAM quantity recently. Cards have gone backwards in how much VRAM they have, like the 3060 getting 12GB of VRAM, but the 4060 only getting 8GB. So, AMD is hitting hard here with 16GB of GDDR6 available.
As for the core’s performance, AMD claims that it’s a moderate step up at 1440p from this, the 7600, and they’re really pushing the idea that this is the perfect upgrade from an RTX 2060. Considering the 2060 is still used by 3.7% of the entire Steam user-base, that’s one hell of a market to be selling to. AMD also compare this to the 4060, with what ends up being a pretty complicated chart to understand as they include raw performance, upsampling performance, and frame generation performance all at once. The long and short of it is that the 7600XT and 4060 should be pretty matched in terms of raw performance, and if you want the “Fluid Motion Frames” enabled you can double that framerate.
They also mention that the built-in video encoder got an upgrade too, both for H264 and H265, and AV1 too. You can also get your streamed video upscaled too, which can help improve the quality of your recorded clips. That’s pretty nice. AMD also makes clear that the extra VRAM means all the generative AI tools that in theory should work on AMD GPUs will work an awful lot better thanks to that VRAM. I can confirm 8GB of VRAM isn’t enough for 13 billion parameter models, although I’m yet to use any of the Premiere Pro AI tools – and honestly I’m not sure what would make me use them, but there you go.
The 7600XT will be available on the 24th of January at $329, which is a tiny bit higher than the 4060, but a pretty close match really.
So, that’s about it for AMD’s CES announcements. I’m most interested in seeing how the 7600XT performs, although I’d admit the 8700G does look like a rather promising chip for budget-constrained builders. While the 1650 isn’t exactly an amazing performer, the fact that a CPU can offer that level of performance on its own is mighty impressive, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually stacks up in the real world. Why AMD is launching new chips for a soon to be two generation old platform I have no idea, but if you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments down below.
