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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Ian Cutress - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
It looks like Chuwi is making sure that their hardware all meets 2.35 GHz and 896 SPs. The Aliexpress ones seem to vary in what is actually unlocked.Chuwi made this for the Japanese PC market. It's a very unique market.
zodiacfml - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
That is impressive, I think they're paying a lot more for this part/spec. I don't expect this be affordable, maybe $500 though cheap for Japanese market.AMD and MS should do something about this console/PC for current and the future, maybe bundle 2 or 3 games to the console plus the price of Windows OS...
orangpelupa - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
Have you tried manually update the driver thru device manager and manually browse to the inf driver file from official amd driver that's the closest to this weird apu? (r7 or rx).Windows will complain blah blah blah, just ignore it. Keep ignoring it and try each driver one by one (in the same family).
Also try to disable windows driver signature enforcement, then manually edit the official amd driver inf with this gpu VID.
I used to to those things to update Radeon gpu on my old asus laptop.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
I didn't go too deep. The Chuwi Aerobox was working as-is, so I left it there when it wasn't as straightforward as it could be.BushLin - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
I'd bet it would take less time to paste the PCI identifier into a recent driver .inf file than it'd take to figure out which games don't run and write the article section about the drivers.Lord of the Bored - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
But the article section about the drivers still needs to be written. You can't just gloss over a complete lack of drivers on the internet, even if you do get to provide driver modding instructions.abufrejoval - Thursday, December 24, 2020 - link
And here I thought this was going to be a piece on how to recycle discarded consoles as Windows 10 thin clients... (or Android-x86 for that matter).Because there is going to be a lot of these going into most likely rather eco-fiendish recycling very soon.
Still, what I find puzzing is that 8-core code must have become the norm with that generation of consoles, yet even the latest and greatest like Microsoft latest Flight Sim never seem to touch more than perhaps 2-3 cores, while they take ages to get going and perform rather mediocre even on slightly above average hardware (using a Ryzen 7 5800X/RTX 2080ti combo).
Eirikr - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Would love to see you this performance under Linux with the latest open source graphics driversEirikr - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Meant to say would love to see you review the performance.Ptosio - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
If Microsoft really cared about the environment to 1% extent of their greenwashing attempts, it would allow Windows software to be run on their Xbox machines.This time people who already own powerful x86 and GPU units in form of a console, would not be forced to essentially buy the same thing twice, cluttering the planet in the process.