The Loyalty to AMD’s GPU Product Among AMD CPU Buyers Is Decreasing
That&#x27;s no surprise.  AMD&#x27;s CPUs are now objectively inferior except for a few narrow use-cases: highly threaded workloads, VM hosts that need lots of physical cores to pin to machines, maximum iGPU performance, ECC RAM support on a budget (note that i3 also supports this), or very cheap fileservers&#x2F;media PCs (especially AM1).  A high-end FX-8350 is going to significantly underperform an i3-6300 while gaming - especially in minimum frametimes.  The single-threaded performance of AMD&#x27;s construction cores (Bulldozer&#x2F;Piledriver&#x2F;Steamroller&#x2F;Excavator) has always been abysmal.<p>The FM2-based products are alright, but they are glorified laptop processors and they do not really compete well in the desktop market overall.  Nice if you want a decent iGPU but most people use discrete GPUs for any serious gaming, and without the iGPU all you have is a mediocre CPU.<p>AMD&#x27;s future in the CPU market rests heavily with Zen.  Right now they essentially do not compete for the vast majority of users (power-sensitive mobile&#x2F;server market, productivity users, or gaming).  They run the games, the averages are sometimes decent, but the minimum frametimes suffer pretty badly and they use a lot of power.  Compare the 99th-percentile frametimes and the cumulative frametime charts here (both are &quot;badness&quot; metric for measuring stutter) and you can see that AMD&#x27;s single-threaded performance really torpedoes some games far beyond expectations.  The FX-8350&#x27;s 99th-percentile frametimes are significantly worse than a Pentium G2130 and it even falls behind a dual-core Clarkdale (first-gen Core i5).<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techreport.com&#x2F;review&#x2F;23750&#x2F;amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed&#x2F;5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techreport.com&#x2F;review&#x2F;23750&#x2F;amd-fx-8350-processor-rev...</a><p>AMD&#x27;s GPU products, on the other hand, are still reasonably competitive - although their top product only competes with a GTX 1070 and is very low on VRAM capacity during a time when VRAM consumption is increasing rapidly and will continue to do so (particularly DX12 and Vulkan games).  The RX 480 is a solid card though, especially for the price, and the Fury is due for a refresh soon with the new Vega series, which will undoubtedly have more VRAM.<p>In particular, there&#x27;s a problem with combining AMD GPUs and AMD CPUs.  AMD&#x27;s GPU driver stack has a reputation for being single-threaded and somewhat inefficient - so you really need good single-threaded performance with AMD GPUs more than ever before, and Intel processors are very much the preferred pairing.  Again, this difference is particularly pronounced when comparing <i>minimum</i> frametimes rather than averages.<p>They have been working hard on cleaning this up with Crimson and they made another big driver refresh recently too - but AFAIK there&#x27;s still a pretty significant quality-of-life improvement from using Intel processors with your AMD GPU due to minimum frametime improvements.<p>Conversely NVIDIA&#x27;s driver stack has a reputation for being less dependent on good single-threaded CPU performance.  So perversely, if you are running on an AMD CPU then you are best off getting an NVIDIA GPU.<p>Also, side note: AM1 is my favorite AMD CPU platform right now <i>by far</i>.  The CPU supports ECC, most motherboards don&#x27;t but the Asus AM1M-A does.  It makes a nice little NAS box if you can forgive its paltry 2 onboard SATA channels and mATX footprint, and you can pick up a CPU+mobo for $45 from MicroCenter.