Doom 2016 / Eternal runs well under Ryzen 5 5600G Integrated Graphics

[Foebane72]

I used to have an Intel Core i3-8100 system with the UHD 630 integrated graphics, and they were tough to get working fast and looking OK, but I gave up as it was just not good enough for heavy action. BTW, I haven't had a discrete graphics card since my last one died in 2020.

 

Then I heard about the Ryzen 5 Integrated Graphics being the best there was, so I thought I'd base my next PC on that, with 16Gb of dual-channel 3200 memory and a 480Gb NVMe drive and boy, was I surprised!

 

Doom 2016 runs well, although I have to put it down to 720p but at "high overall quality" for the best balance, but it's a lot better than the Intel stuff. As for Doom Eternal, that somehow runs faster and smoother on the Ryzen 5 5600G, although I currently have the resolution set to 1600x900 and "medium overall quality" set, but it's as smooth as butter, even in the intense early action. A bonus is that I don't hear the fan spinning faster during heavy workloads, something that bothered me about the old GTX 960 I had.

 

I think it's no wonder Integrated Graphics are so popular now thanks to the Ryzen series, because discrete graphics cards have just been too ridiculously expensive because of scalpers and bitcoin miners. With iGPUs like the Ryzen 5 around, I need never bother with a card ever again!

 

[Foebane72]

Oh, no replies after a few days.

 

I thought there would at least be a debate started on the advantages between integrated graphics chips and discrete graphics cards, as the former are getting more powerful and the latter are so expensive now.

 

I suppose my reputation is preceding me.

 

[Professor Hastig]

By today's standards the UHD 630 is not the strongest iGPU around. What gets built into modern CPUs is roughly the same performance as a mid-range GPU from 7-10 years ago.

 

Some games can deal with this, others can not, but don't fool yourself: Compared to even an affordable modern mid range card these iGPUs are still comparatively weak.

 

[Redneckerz]

37 minutes ago, Professor Hastig said:

 

Some games can deal with this, others can not, but don't fool yourself: Compared to even an affordable modern mid range card these iGPUs are still comparatively weak.

 

Ryzen APU's are comparable, especially 680M.

[Darkcrafter07]

I got a notebook that I obtained to be more mobile with Intel Iris Xe Graphics, really curious how it runs Doom 2016 and Eternal. According to youtube, Doom 2016 runs playably but not that great, Eternal will get even harder to handle. At one hand, it's wonderful that finally in 2020s we have CPUs with beast of a 2013 graphics cards built into the them, thanks AMD that also kicked Intel ass to do it either, it's amazing as a matter of fact that we can even game with them. On the other hand, they are still not as powerful as discrete solutions but this is definitely something I'd take for granted when buying a mobile computer.

[Foebane72]

Well, I'm thinking that around the mid-to-late 2010s, graphics card developers reached the limits of conventional accelerated graphics and have been developing real-time ray-tracing with the Nvidia RTX series of cards, for an example. It's costing millions to develop, is still in its infancy and that could be another reason for the extra cost of new high-end cards.

 

I'm certainly not expecting RTX-level graphics in an APU, not yet!

 

[ebrl]

2016 and Eternal are probably be the most ridiculously optimized games I've played in the last 10 years by a very wide margin, so take good performance in these with a grain of salt.

[Murdoch]

5 minutes ago, ebrl said:

2016 and Eternal are probably be the most ridiculously optimized games I've played in the last 10 years by a very wide margin, so take good performance in these with a grain of salt.

 

Indeed; they run impressively well on even modest hardware like my eight year old GTX970.

[Lucius Wooding]

Next people will be saying their smartphone can replace their gaming PC. Of course this is all relative since 90% of what I play came out before 2010, but while APUs punch above their weight in terms of price performance, they can't realistically compete with discrete GPUs for practical engineering reasons. With that said, these are mad times in the GPU market and I hope people are realistic about their budget and their needs.

 

2 hours ago, Foebane72 said:

Well, I'm thinking that around the mid-to-late 2010s, graphics card developers reached the limits of conventional accelerated graphics and have been developing real-time ray-tracing with the Nvidia RTX series of cards, for an example. It's costing millions to develop, is still in its infancy and that could be another reason for the extra cost of new high-end cards.

 

I'm certainly not expecting RTX-level graphics in an APU, not yet!

 

Ugh, ray tracing. Regarding this quote:

Spoiler

There hasn't been any "limit" on conventional rendering performance. The latest cards still outperform those from 2016 in terms of rendering, power efficiency and memory (and by quite a good bit). Otherwise you could get an older gpu for 200 bucks and not have to shell out for a workstation for Blender or CAD type of stuff that doesn't necessarily use RTX. Gaming is only a slice of the computing market. There's been rampant price gouging that has been due to the crypto market, demand for streaming/server infrastructure, inflation, the pandemic, supply manipulation, and the lack of competition among suppliers.

 

RTX cores add to the cost of hardware, but this was done intentionally to raise prices since there wasn't much choice for consumers. More games use those features now than at launch, but it's still not very well utilized or optimized and a lot of players just turn RTX off in favor of better FPS/settings. Nvidia is not trying to pass along their R+D costs to us, they're just adding it in despite it being terrible value because it's good business. If we have to buy a gpu, and they can sell us a 700$ one instead of 500$ and only AMD as competition, why wouldn't they charge more? It's very telling that they aren't selling anything for gaming on their latest architecture without RTX that's either at any kind of reduced cost or slightly bumped performance. Such a thing would be in high demand but Nvidia continues to rely on their leadership in conventional gaming performance to drive pricing rather than conforming to customer need. 

 

Despite that rant and everything below, I'm not a hater on APUs. If you're making the value for money argument, there's no doubt that you can use APUs for a decent amount of games, particularly older ones and those where you can drop settings. Expectations play a big part in this; if you don't mind lower resolution and fps and settings anyway, and you can save a bunch of money or make a system last longer by going with the APU, then it looks really good. And yeah the market for discrete GPUs is so shit, I'm rooting for Intel and maybe in a couple more years there will be decent options at 200-350$ again. You get really poor value in cards but there are a lot of CPUs and APUs that are decent value, so that part I agree with. But I really don't agree that APUs can replace GPUs for the GPU's purpose. IMO It's more likely that GPUs will die entirely and give way to cloud gaming (or become 50 times as large and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe can afford them) than be replaced by a shared die APU in the gaming market. Or what I wish would happen is all AAA games would innovate and optimize their games properly instead of just adding bloat that necessitates hardware creep. 

 

APUs are nice for what they are, as a way to reduce costs and integrate power and cooling for constrained and mobile systems. APUs exist because discrete GPUs are just unneeded by many people and the overall system cost is hundreds cheaper. For something like an office computer or media center that just needs a port to stick the monitor in, the requirements for performance are paltry and even building in 10$ worth of graphics cores is plenty. (Running RTX on something like that would definitely not run well because the discrete cards have specialized cores to handle it btw.) And it's not its main priority in design to run games at a good framerate without drops; the main features would be efficient UI and video playback and possibly supporting large/multiple monitors as possible for productivity. But obviously AMD or Intel will still find a couple games where it runs OK and claim it has great gaming performance (compared to what?). What it really is is a bare bones solution; however they've come along far enough to have some worth, admittedly. They can be ideal for limited gaming, but you really have to sacrifice a lot if that's your only option. 

 

I've given consideration to a Ryzen APU or similar if I ever get the money to build a retro gaming box for the living room, for example. It'd be able to do a lot as a PC because the CPU is really good, and I'd just sacrifice the notion of playing anything more demanding than Dolphin or pre 2010 games most likely. Could even run tabletop gaming nights through it with a projector or screen built into a table, and stream background music. That kind of machine is a lot more customizable and worth it to me than buying a console, and could probably be built for a comparable amount. But even the PC I built 4 years ago is going to be a lot better for PC gaming than any APU for like 8 more years yet, although the CPU is already aging more than the rest of the system.

 

You bring up a good point with the noise, personally I like to keep my system power a bit down and fans lower since keeping everything cranked for performance is often a bad experience IMO. With a small room and no AC, I have to suffer massive ballsweat if my fans are running hot. Not to mention it really necessitates a headset to compensate for the noise. Quite nice to have the extra headroom though.

 

However APUs like yours will almost always be quieter than a discrete GPU because they use a fraction of the power budget, but that's not a fair comparison necessarily:

Spoiler

Noise is a result of cooling, which needs to scale with wattage (electrical power which is turned 100% into heat). Your APU has a TDP of 65w while the 960 is 120w (plus a CPU at another 65w), and would be running on its own set of fans in addition to the CPU. It's cooling a third of the wattage now, and presumably that's far easier to clear heat buildup in the case as well.

 

Often you notice 2 sets of fans more than a single one, particularly if the speed changes often. Some cards just tend to be noisy as well (cheap fans, blower design, rattle, coil whine), but bad case airflow or cooler design can hurt your performance and make the fans work harder. Blower cards can be especially bad, much worse performance and much louder than the same card in a better design. 

 

As far as APU graphics go, the power and cooling package tends to be a lot smaller. You have to fit many more components on the same die and share as much between them as possible, so it's not feasible to match the performance of a discrete GPU. Jamming everything tightly together makes it harder to cool everything (all the cores from both processors, power delivery, VRAM, cache), so the solution is to limit power of the combined chip to what can comfortably run in a CPU socket and just use a CPU cooler. 

 

On the subject of value, personally I avoid the top tier flagship components and highest settings, as well as almost all new games. Just by ignoring the new releases for a couple years you end up skipping everything that's broken and poorly optimized at launch, plus you usually can pay a fraction of the prices and often get DLC thrown in. And generally you can get a high end experience as intended, but on cheaper hardware by that point. Personally I play a lot of older games and I definitely get more use out of my PC from emulation than new releases; most emulators can be demanding or at least rewarding for having a good rig. 

 

However, as others have said Doom 2016 is an outlier for performance and does very favorably on systems like this:

Spoiler

Doom 2016 is also almost 7 years old, and it's notorious for running decently on low end machines. It's hard to find good benchmarks but I'm seeing several in the 600+fps range for top end hardware these days. So running it on lower settings I'm not surprised even if you're hitting 60 on a fairly recent APU. Dropping resolution will also scale your performance a lot in a game like this; not only are there a lot fewer pixels, but the post processing stuff is a lot easier to handle as well. If you give the system little enough to do each frame and plenty of CPU, then your fps and consistency should be fine with any GPU.

 

Don't forget, it had to run on older GPUs when it was new, so a decent gaming rig from 2011-2012 would expect it to be playable at low settings at the least. Your GPU is probably somewhat better compared to something like that (although with some advantages from being modern), but your CPU is actually pretty decent by comparison. Your iGPU is going to bottleneck in every single 3D game, and if there's any real demand on the CPU then it'll probably thermally throttle both. On that topic, don't underestimate the vast difference in CPU between the Ryzen and i3-8100, which has a third of the thread count and a decent bit less clock speed, on top of the IPC and other architectural improvements and better RAM, likely better SSD, etc. I'm not certain if Doom 2016 cares about threads that much, but it will certainly help deal with Windows hogging them in the background.

 

The Ryzen is a nice upgrade (Intel 8/9th gen aged like milk with the lack of threads) and there's probably a much bigger potential for performance if you got a better GPU. Almost no upgrade to your system besides the GPU will matter much for gaming however. If you could get the fastest RAM, SSD, and best desktop CPU in existence but still somehow run your iGPU, your performance in gaming will be pretty much the same as it is now.

 

 

[Foebane72]

What I would like to know is, why is Doom Eternal smoother on the Ryzen 5 5600G graphics than Doom 2016? True, I turned down the detail a bit and the resolution down one notch from 1080p so it's a bit blurry, but Doom Eternal is running as smooth as silk otherwise, whilst Doom 2016 drops frames sometimes. Could that be due to the megatextures being used by 2016? Maybe fetching from SSD? The worst thing is, I've got 2016 at just 720p!

 

I sometimes wonder how id Tech 7 (Doom Eternal) ditched megatextures altogether and looks just as uniquely-textured in all areas as well as extremely highly detailed, and runs better and (I'd say) less use of storage space as well, than id Tech 6!

 

I suppose it's just down to the id Techs not requiring as many resources and processing power as the other AAA titles of their time, but I did notice how well 2016 and Eternal looked on my old GTX 960 as well - my major concern with Eternal back then was whether I had enough memory, since I couldn't find out, but when Eternal showed my graphics card memory, I was pleasantly surprised. I'd forgotten I'd bought a higher-spec card than I thought I did.

 

[Darkcrafter07]

1 hour ago, Foebane72 said:

What I would like to know is, why is Doom Eternal smoother on the Ryzen 5 5600G graphics than Doom 2016? True, I turned down the detail a bit and the resolution down one notch from 1080p so it's a bit blurry, but Doom Eternal is running as smooth as silk otherwise, whilst Doom 2016 drops frames sometimes. Could that be due to the megatextures being used by 2016? Maybe fetching from SSD? The worst thing is, I've got 2016 at just 720p!

 

I sometimes wonder how id Tech 7 (Doom Eternal) ditched megatextures altogether and looks just as uniquely-textured in all areas as well as extremely highly detailed, and runs better and (I'd say) less use of storage space as well, than id Tech 6!

 

I suppose it's just down to the id Techs not requiring as many resources and processing power as the other AAA titles of their time, but I did notice how well 2016 and Eternal looked on my old GTX 960 as well - my major concern with Eternal back then was whether I had enough memory, since I couldn't find out, but when Eternal showed my graphics card memory, I was pleasantly surprised. I'd forgotten I'd bought a higher-spec card than I thought I did.

 

Perhaps because of how games treat video memory differently and work with textures. It's completely otherwise here with GTX 1060 3gb, Doom 2016 is 100 FPS and drops to 75FPS rarely in Ultra Full HD, while Doom Eternal on lows runs at 70 FPS and drops to as low as 30 FPS during battles so I have to disable AA and lower shadow map texture sizes in order to go Full HD.

[Foebane72]

7 hours ago, Darkcrafter07 said:

Perhaps because of how games treat video memory differently and work with textures. It's completely otherwise here with GTX 1060 3gb, Doom 2016 is 100 FPS and drops to 75FPS rarely in Ultra Full HD, while Doom Eternal on lows runs at 70 FPS and drops to as low as 30 FPS during battles so I have to disable AA and lower shadow map texture sizes in order to go Full HD.

 

Maybe memory is the issue? My GTX 960 back in the day was 4gb, so both games ran flawlessly on it.

 

As it is at the moment: I say Doom Eternal runs fine on my Ryzen 5 5600G at the moment, but so far, I've only gotten as far as Cultist Base, the Greenland-based ice and snow level, so I suppose it might slow down as it gets to the later stages? I'll let you know if it does.

 

[Darkcrafter07]

3 hours ago, Foebane72 said:

 

Maybe memory is the issue? My GTX 960 back in the day was 4gb, so both games ran flawlessly on it.

 

As it is at the moment: I say Doom Eternal runs fine on my Ryzen 5 5600G at the moment, but so far, I've only gotten as far as Cultist Base, the Greenland-based ice and snow level, so I suppose it might slow down as it gets to the later stages? I'll let you know if it does.

 

Oh yes, Cultist Base is a relatively fast level, regarding the performance. As soon as you enter super gore nest with lava pouring down from hovering skulls or doom hunter base (next to cultist), you could notice some slow down.

[Foebane72]

20 hours ago, Darkcrafter07 said:

Oh yes, Cultist Base is a relatively fast level, regarding the performance. As soon as you enter super gore nest with lava pouring down from hovering skulls or doom hunter base (next to cultist), you could notice some slow down.

 

I've just reached Super Gore Nest: no slowdown. And Doom Hunter Base was smooth as well.

 

As for Doom 2016, I've had some major slowdowns with the Argent Tower sequence, namely looking through observation windows at the tower interior. I suppose it must be the numerous shaders used. I find I have to look away from detailed parts to speed up the game.

 

[Foebane72]

Reached ARC Complex yesterday and saw significant slowdown for the first time, namely where the Doom Slayer is controlling and aiming the cannons to blast the giant tentacles off of the ARC Complex entrance. Significant frame drop, to slightly less than half.

 

[D4NUK1]

4 hours ago, Foebane72 said:

Reached ARC Complex yesterday and saw significant slowdown for the first time, namely where the Doom Slayer is controlling and aiming the cannons to blast the giant tentacles off of the ARC Complex entrance. Significant frame drop, to slightly less than half.

 

Maybe for the effects of the cutscene, i remember my GPU also droping frames there.

[Foebane72]

19 hours ago, D4NUK1 said:

Maybe for the effects of the cutscene, i remember my GPU also droping frames there.

 

Well, the slowdown happens in the cockpit cutscenes when Doom Slayer is aiming, but the cutscenes of the weapons blasting the tentacles is full frame. The elaborate animation of the Super Gore Nest exploding earlier was also full frame.

 

It could be a combination of the rendering of the cockpit as well as all the outside views as well, together. I noticed that in Doom 2016, the dropped frames happened when looking through large windows, like when Doom Slayer is in a control room inside the Argent Tower looking through a window at the central core.

 

It doesn't happen that often, though.

 

[Jello]

On 5/22/2023 at 7:24 PM, Murdoch said:

 

Indeed; they run impressively well on even modest hardware like my eight year old GTX970.

Indeed, the games are really well optimized for older hardware. I'm running an i7 4770  with a GTX1660 and 16GB RAM, and Doom 2016 runs on Ultra settings at 1080p at 220FPS, Doom Eternal runs at a pretty consistent 100-120 FPS at the same settings.  That's not really bad for a 10 year old CPU. They really did some magic with the games.