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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Oxford Guy - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Polaris was a low-end design when it was released and it was rehashed endlessly.Jorgp2 - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Jaguar has a higher IPC than Piledriver.Oxford Guy - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
That’s now what I had read but okay. Was there time to update the design beyond Piledriver in time for the “consoles”?And, if Jaguar really was so competitive then why did AMD use Piledriver, Steamroller, and Excacator?
jjem002 - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
They continued with Piledriver and such since they could clock 50%+ higher than jaguar, so in the desktop space the performance lost from IPC could be made up for by increasing the power limits.AntonErtl - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
As someone pointed out, clock rate matters as much as IPC; Piledriver has up to 5GHz (4.3GHz @ 95W), while Jaguar was available only up to 2.4GHz (Opteron X2170).As for IPC, I can only give you Bobcat (AMD E-450) and Excavator (Athlon X4 845) numbers. On our LaTeX benchmark, I see IPC=0.97 on the Bobcat and IPC=1.35 on the Excavator, with the overall result that the Athlon X4 845 runs the benchmark 3.2 times as fast as the E-450.
Supposedly Jaguar has 15% higher IPC than Bobcat and Excavator has also some IPC advantage over Piledriver, so maybe Jaguar has roughly the same IPC as Piledriver.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
"so maybe Jaguar has roughly the same IPC as Piledriver"That makes more sense. Since Piledriver was a very unoptimized design it seems very reasonable to conclude that better performance could have been had from the CMT path, had AMD bothered to do it. Instead, AMD went cheap, both for the "consoles" and in how it did Steamroller and Excavator. Similarly, that was us getting Polaris forever.
Piledriver was designed, intentionally, to rely on high clocks to be relevant. The thing is, though, it could run at a good clock (see the 8320E) with decent power consumption. I doubt that Jaguar had anything to offer beyond smaller die size on a cheap inferior node (28 nm bulk).
Maybe that's impressive to some but it doesn't impress me. The "consoles" with their super lame Jaguar design, were a drain on the PC gaming platform. People paid to be suckered.
Gigaplex - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
The fact it's impossible to get drivers for this suggests that this is not an AMD sanctioned release. It's a deal-breaker for Windows usage. It would be interesting to see if the Linux drivers work with it.Alistair - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
Come on Microsoft, release the Surface desktop already, build it on the Series S's modern 7nm CPU. $300 for the console, charge $600 for the PC, I'd buy a ton of them.dontlistentome - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
Me too. Dinky case, multiple monitor output and quiet fan please. Maybe a square version of the Series S in sensible matt black.zodiacfml - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
saw this on aliexpress back then but a quick search on its performance easily makes this a pricey and environmentally unfriendly paperweight. i find it hard to believe Chuwi would bother with this. they're better off with those old Xeon processors, plenty availability and performance though discrete graphics won't be an option for Chuwi.