AMD A10-7850K vs. Intel/AMD CPU/APU Comparison

While the AMD A10-7850K wasn't too good in the processor tests, the Radeon R7 Graphics on the A10-7850K did great in comparison to the Intel HD Graphics on the Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell CPUs. It's important to point out though that Kaveri has the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver in use while Intel's only Linux support was via the open-source DRI/Mesa stack, which was used. AMD also has their open-source Kaveri driver, which will be tested in a later article.

The AMD A10-7850K APU with Catalyst driver on Linux did extremely well and beat out all of the Intel HD 2000/2500/3000/4000/4400/4600 Graphics except for the Ivy Bridge 3770K system. However, remember that with the latest Intel driver code it looks like Haswell might have a hard regression.

When running Catalyst on the Kaveri APU you also have OpenGL 4.3 support available while Intel's Linux driver is bound to OpenGL 3.3 compliance with some OpenGL 4 extensions. OpenGL 4.0 support will hopefully materialize within Intel (and upstream Mesa) later in the year. If using the open-source "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver on Kaveri you will be limited to OpenGL 3.1 at the moment.