AMD Kaveri Review: A10-7850K, A10-7700K and A8-7600

Hybrid CrossFire | Dual Graphics

AMD’s Kaveri APUs bring support for Hybrid CrossFire. With Kaveri AMD is now naming the system “Dual Graphics” but it is essentially the same thing. Below you can see how the performance scaled by adding some discrete graphics cards solution to the mix. We’ve also put an R7 260X in there for context. Anyone who’d be interested in reading a more in-depth analysis of what we think about Hybrid CrossFire can do so right here. Our final judgement on AMD’s Hybrid CrossFire implementation with Kaveri can be seen below for those who do not want to read the full article.

“AMD’s Dual Graphics technology has improved a lot since it’s first implementation. It offers the potential to scale the performance of your APU for a relatively small cost and without adding much power consumption to your system. Yet at the core of AMD Dual Graphics is a fundamental flaw – it isn’t an economically sensible decision unless you already own an APU. For the vast majority of consumers you would benefit more from pairing an unlocked AMD Athlon CPU with a powerful R7 series graphics card within the same budget – this option offers much more performance for the same, or a lower, cost. The technology is novel but until it is optimised better and until entry level AMD cards become significantly cheaper than the mid-range ones, it probably won’t appeal to many people.”