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
Don’t forget Sony, the company that advertised the ability to run Linux on the PS3 to sell them and then yanked away the ability. Then, in court, the company tried to call the plaintiffs bad apple ‘nobodies’. The company argued that ‘no one’ had any interest in running Linux on the machines — of course after the military among others did exactly that. A relentless patterns of bad faith from a corporation? Perish the thought.osx86h3avy - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
My understanding was allowing Linux was a knee jerkmreaction to the og Xbox being hacked to run Linux et al,and Sony was like "pfft, yall want it we will give it to ya" in a sort of bad faith way originally.....not that it makes it ok to then drop support later like they did but it always struck me as more of a fu to m$ than serious consideration for the communityOxford Guy - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
Sony chose to make effort to advertise the feature. It wasn't just listed in small print.Sony then pulled a bait and switch. I think I heard the suggestion that it was done as a way to protect BluRay discs from being ripped. Regardless of the reason, Sony had no legal or ethical way to cut a feature out of the product it had sold to people. It's like the scandal of e-book providers reaching into your device to delete books you purchased.
Lord of the Bored - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
To my recollection, it was for tax purposes. It let them call it a computer rather than a game console in some regions.Rookierookie - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
Microsoft obviously doesn't want to affect the Windows PC market.Sony, though, I don't know. They sell PCs, yes, but I don't know if VAIO is big enough that Sony would actually be harmed if they enabled the capability on their consoles. They've also done something similar before, by making the PS2 a DVD player as well.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
Microsoft obviously wants to have its cake (a "console" it can make money on) and eat it, too (Windows PC gaming).Too bad the public isn't smart enough to say no and demand a common software layer (Vulkan + OpenGL) to go with the common hardware layer (x86).
Alexvrb - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
This would have made *SOME* sense if it was released years ago and used faster DDR3 in a quad channel configuration like the consoles themselves. Even better if they had worked with AMD to enable the eSRAM but that's a long shot for a niche APU. The actual configuration used is just awful for anything other than dumping old stock of DDR3.At least we are finally seeing a similar cache used to good effect on PC with the RX 6000 series.
eastcoast_pete - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Now I know they aren't really directly comparable, but how much better or faster is this setup when compared with, let's say, a Snapdragon 865+ based gaming smartphone like the Asus ROG III? Is there a way to run Aztec Ruins or whatever on this Chuwi box, just to get an idea? My strong suspicion is that the gaming smartphone will actually hold its own.B3an - Saturday, December 26, 2020 - link
I've love to see this compared to high-end phone SoC's from the last few years. I've been saying all this time that they've been faster than the base XO console for a long time now.lmcd - Monday, December 28, 2020 - link
The SRAM cache enables nearly double the memory bandwidth in scenarios that are apparently very important and/or very common, so it's not a small thing to gloss over. And likewise this isn't a platform Windows is at all optimized for. I agree that in CPU-bottlenecked scenarios you're clearly right but it's pretty easy to push a videogame toward GPU-bottlenecked imo.