By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Asymetric crossfire can work when your complete setup is designed for it. If(!) the GFlops somewhat resemble the actual performance of the GPUs a 2:1 frame-ratio may be the way Sony want's to go with their design (if the rumours are true at all), if a game wants to have really nice graphics (if not the extra power may be used for physics-calculations or maybe calculations necessary for the move-controller etc).

So for each 2 frames the dedicated GPUs processes 1 frame is processed in the GPU-Part of the APU. This would result in 50% more FPS compared to only the dedicated GPU doing all the work.
10-15fps increase doesn't tell you much if you don't give the FPS the games ran without the crossfire setup (a 10-15fps increase when running at 20-30fps before is a big deal). Most of the tests with PC-Hardware use test scenarios where none of the coming consoles will be able to deliver high enough framerates.

And really: The problem with the APU in desktops is the DDR3-Ram. Tests showed that the HD 6550D is capped with Ram with a speed lower than ~1500Mhz. Even if you use 1866Mhz-Ram you still get capped if you only increase the clock-rate by around 20%. But with GDDR5 you can essentially get each bandwidth you want, so bandwidth isn't a limit anymore at that point and you may overclock the GPU-Part(!!) of AMD's APU. Afair an increase in that clockrate (as long as you don't have to increase the voltage!) doesn't lead to a high increase in power consumption.

But even if the GPU in the APU can't be used to it's full power, I don't think that it's right to just ignore it. It has to be somewhere on the tables on page 1 (just put a note there that we don't know how it will actually be used).