Ryzen APU: Ryzen plus Vega saves budget gamers during a GPU drought

Let’s just lay our cards down at once. AMD’s Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G APUs are everything budget gamers have been praying for: surprisingly decent gaming performance at a shockingly low price.

In years past, such a statement would be met by skepticism and dismissive “whatever” animated GIFs. But AMD actually over-delivered on its Ryzen CPUs last year, so talks of combining those same Zen cores with the latest and greatest Radeon Vega graphics cores has cash-strapped gamers in a tizzy of excitement. And it turns out the excitement is warranted. Compared to a similarly equipped Intel-based system running a Core i3, the lower-end Ryzen 3 2200G is 142 percent faster in 3DMark Fire Strike, 154 percent faster in 3DMark Time Spy, and 203 percent faster in Rainbow Six Siege. Those are just a few of the highlights from our game performance testing, which you can see if you jump to our gaming tests below.

In practical terms, AMD’s new budget wonder chips should be able to produce a reasonable 60 fps at 720p in many games, and some will be playable at 1080p, too. So if you’ve been avoiding building a gaming PC because of sky-high GPU prices, these new AMD APUs provide some intriguing options—at least on the budget end.

Now we’ll dig into the Ryzen APU specs and architecture before we return to our performance results.

RYZEN 3 2200G AND RYZEN 5 2400G SPECS

There are two Ryzen APU parts AMD is releasing. The Ryzen 3 2200G () features four Zen cores without symmetrical multi-threading (SMT), which is AMD’s version of Intel’s Hyper-Threading. The cores have a base clock of 3.5GHz with a boost clock of 3.7GHz.