Installing Windows on an Xbox One APU: The Chuwi Aerobox Review
by Dr. Ian Cutress on December 24, 2020 9:45 AM ESTGaming Performance
So there’s going to be a lot of interest as to how this performs in our gaming tests, given the heritage of the processor. However, as previously mentioned, there are three things that are going to be against us here.
First is the driver stack. On a console the top to bottom software stack is optimized for both performance and ease of use. Game engine creators and game developers can both work to a fixed set of hardware, and take advantage of how close to the metal that software stack can be; this is why we get such great looking games as the lifecycle of a console continues. By contrast, our system has a straight forward version of Windows 10. It is as generic as it gets, which means optimizations will be on a much lower scale.
Second are the drivers themselves. There is no up-to-date solution here; our system shipped with beta versions of Adrenaline 17.12, which indicates we have December 2017 drivers. None of AMD’s regular driver packages will recognize this system as it uses a custom embedded processor. Some games will refuse to run because the drivers are so old. As a result we’re stuck in the services with a flat tire and no rescue in sight.
Third is the lack of additional eSRAM to help with memory bandwidth. The Xbox One and One S consoles had 32 MB of SRAM plus DDR3, while the Xbox One X had no SRAM but GDDR5. The A9-9820 APU has neither, instead relying on DDR3, and slow DDR3 at that. Memory bandwidth would appear to be a very obvious bottleneck in this regard, assuming that the graphics cores have plenty to work on.
Gaming Results
With all that being said, here are our numbers, and we’re putting them up against some of the very basic competition from our database. Perhaps the best modern comparison point will be to the Ryzen 5 2400G, however we also have a Ryzen V1605B here, which is a 12 W embedded Zen processor with Vega 8 graphics. On the Intel side, I have the Core i5-6500U, a mid-range Skylake mobile processor used in many mini-PCs.
All of our games here are running at 720p minimum settings or lower, and the numbers will show you why.
| Benchmark Results | |||||
| AnandTech | Chuwi Aerobox |
Ryzen 5 2400G |
Ryzen V1605B |
Core i5 6500U |
|
| Frames Per Second Averages | |||||
| Civilization 6 | 480p Min | 24.4 | 91.2 | 52.9 | 35.7 |
| Final Fantasy XV | 720p Med | 20.1 | 26.8 | 14.2 | 35.4 |
| World of Tanks | 768p Min | 144.7 | 223.8 | 141.1 | 165.8 |
| Borderlands 3 | 360p VLow | 31.3 | 70.8 | 42.9 | 29.0 |
| Far Cry 5 | 360p Low | 31.5 | 58.0 | 25.5 | 19.0 |
| GTA 5 | 720p Low | 37.8 | 83.0 | 52.9 | 32.8 |
| 95th Frame Time Percentiles (shown as FPS) | |||||
| Civilization 6 | 480p Min | 17.1 | 57.6 | 34.8 | 26.8 |
| Final Fantasy XV | 720p Med | 17.1 | 22.6 | 11.3 | 6.8 |
| World of Tanks | 768p Min | 40.2 | 130.7 | 84.5 | 115.2 |
| Borderlands 3 | 360p VLow | 24.2 | 55.2 | 32.7 | 22.3 |
| Far Cry 5 | 360p Low | 26.0 | 49.0 | 21.5 | 16.0 |
| GTA 5 | 720p Low | 25.4 | 56.6 | 38.3 | 23.3 |
In games like Civilization where the CPU matters, and in some of the other numbers, the poor performing Jaguar cores show how bad it can get – that low World of Tanks percentile comes into playm scoring only 40 FPS. If it weren’t for the CPU, the A9-9820 would be comfortably ahead of the i5-6500U in all of the tests. Games that didn’t run due to driver issues included F1 2019, Gears Tactics, and Red Dead Redemption.
From a personal experience perspective, I set myself up with a wired Xbox controller, and I very comfortably played several hours of Borderlands 3 single player at 720p Ultra Low settings. Frame rates hovered around the 30s, dipping into the 20s during firefights, or up in the 40s when walking through open spaces or in the towns.
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FunBunny2 - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
"also remember how tightly optimized you can get with your code when you know the hardware and also when you can code to the hardware without needing to worry so much about abstraction layers, other overhead and DRM that a publisher might slap on after you've already optimized the game."you can thank Mitch for writing 1-2-3 only to 8086 assembler and DOS. from that gossamer layer of an 'operating system' we got neato games and viruses that happily fiddled the hardware.
Flunk - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
I'm hoping the new consoles will bring better AI and interactivity because they have massively better CPUs than the previous generation.StuntFriar - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
I was working in a dev studio at the time that was using its own in-house engine for a series of niche sports titles (Cricket, Rugby, etc...) and we couldn't believe how weak the Jaguar cores were compared to the PowerPC cores on the PS3 and 360.The GPUs on the PS4 and XBone were obviously superior but we were heavily bottlenecked on the CPU side, because our engine made use of a managed Lua interpreter for all of our game scripting (basically, the majority of gameplay code) which ran on the main thread.
These were games that easily ran at 30fps on a PS3 which were now struggling to hit 15fps on an XBone. The team had to port a lot of the Lua to native C++ code, as well as a huge amount of other optimisations to get it running well.
Jorgp2 - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
War?These 8 out of order Jaguar cores should be an order of magnitude faster than the in order core of the PS3.
StuntFriar - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
As a whole, yes. Core for core, the old PPC cores on the PS3 and 360 were faster at some things.Most game engines in 2010 were heavily single-threaded with only a few things handled on other threads. If you were migrating to the PS4 and XBone, there was usually a fair bit of work to do.
lmcd - Sunday, December 27, 2020 - link
PS3 had 2 PPE cores and 6 SPE cores. The 2 PPE cores certainly exceeded Jaguar cores for interpreted workloads, considering how narrow Jaguar designs are, how limited their cache was/is, and the fact that (IIRC) a Jaguar core's out of order depth is lower than that of a PPE PowerPC core.at_clucks - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
@StuntFriar, the reason PS3 games may have issues when running on the Jaguar is the same why they may have issues running on much faster x86 CPUs, and the reason many console games run like crap on much faster PCs. The porting isn't perfect (read "they're many times a mess") and the Cell CPU in the PS3 is very different from x86. Devs had a bad time writing for the PS3 so "porting" usually meant "rewrite from scratch". Now why rewrite a particular game to hit the 1:1 between the PS3 and the next gen consoles when the latter could vastly outperform the PS3 in every regard so you'd actually go for much higher targets? And many of the inexperienced devs that tried to just port PS3 to x86 1:1 of course had an even worse time because they were trying to "adapt" PS3 code to run on something vastly diffrent. Maybe let us know what games ran 30FPS on PS3 but were "struggling" to hit 15FPS on XBone (I know of absolutely no game that runs at 15FPS on XBone). But you were a dev back then so I'm sure you know all this ;).The PS3 was a dead end from a programming perspective so any attempts to "port" instead of rewrite was destined to fail badly especially at the hands of the average code monkey. There are things that run great on paper but "porting" them to a digital computer is not that great if you *really* want to replicate everything 1:1. Rewriting has a reason.
It's like saying you could easily hit 30Km/h on a bicycle but on a motorcycle you can barely hit 2Km/h while pedaling the wheels with your own 2 feet just like on the bicycle, proof that motorcycles are slower.
StuntFriar - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
We didn't release the game at 15fps on PS4/XBone - we optimised it so that it ran better.Read what I wrote again. We had a managed Lua VM running on the main thread. This is typically fine because the single Power PC core on the Cell processor (or each of the equivalent ones on the 360) was strong enough to run it along with the C++ main game thread.
A single Jaguar core couldn't match it, which is why we had to rely less on Lua and ported most of it to C++. The engine guys also did some optimisations to spread some of the work across the other cores - the engine also ran on the 360 and already farmed off stuff like animation on a separate thread. I don't know the exact details because I wasn't on that project but they got it together in the end and it ran fine on PS4 and XBone when released.
at_clucks - Tuesday, December 29, 2020 - link
It's like saying that gas is better than electric because you tried putting gas in your battery and it couldn't handle it. Yes, the Jaguar cores can;t handle code that was written and optimized specifically for some completely different type of core. No wonder most people consider game devs bottom of the barrel devs: very little understanding in general, very low quality code. And before you argue read what you wrote again. And think if you'd want any software to run with the same kind of glitches and crashes games do.at_clucks - Tuesday, December 29, 2020 - link
And just to not leave you hanging since you won't reach the conclusion yourself, the recent Xbox 8 core Jaguar sits at ~150GFLOPS. Which is... almost exactly what the Cell could do. And I won't get into integer performance where the Cell still pretty much used an abacus. Now given the difficulties to actually optimize for the Cell since good game devs are rarer then hen's teeth, pretty much no game got close to that while in x86 even code monkeys could do it.It's relatively hard to compare *CPU to CPU* since the Cell and AMD's APUs are very different. But they switched to x86 because it was better in all shapes and forms, better power, better performance, and you could actually get that performance even with code monkeys. And it's a good thing they did, even with ~15 years of (claimed) hindsight your understanding is still that code written and optimized for one architecture and design ran poorly when straight up ported to another one that was as different as they could get.