AMD Fusion for Gaming
Fusion debuts... as a software system speed booster
8th October 2008 11:02 GMT
This is undeniably convenient but it made no measurable difference to the performance of our test PC which was built on an MSI DKA790GX motherboard with a Phenom X4 9850 processor and 2GB of 1066MHz DDR 2, all running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. We understand that the Fusion utility will also run on Windows XP.
3DMark06 Results - CPU at 2.5GHz
Longer bars are better
If you fancy a more aggressive approach, you can switch to Advanced mode and then select either the Advanced profile, which works in much the same way as Basic mode except it shuts down a longer list of applications, such as Cryptographic Services. These modes may cause some concern as Fusion will, for instance, shut down your firewall however you can edit any of the profiles to dictate how it works.
Advanced mode
When you finish a gaming session you click the Fusion button to restart all of your software with the minimum of fuss.
3DMark06 Results - CPU overclocked to 3GHz
Longer bars are better
The third mode is Expert and this is where things get interesting as Fusion runs AMD Boost and also kicks AMD OverDrive, ATI Catalyst Auto-Tune and Hard Drive Acceleration into life. Despite the dramatic capitalisation, Hard Drive Acceleration is nothing more than hard drive cacheing, which is an option in System properties.
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Intel Core i7 I7-920 Quad Core Processor (2.66GHz, 4x256kB, 4.8GT/s QPI, LGA 1336 Socket B)
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Quad Core Processor (3.4GHz, 6MB L3 Cache, 4x512KB L2 Cache, 2000 MHz Bus, Socket AM3)
Asus P7P55D Motherboard (Intel Socket H LGA1156, P55 Express, ATX, 16GB DDR3)
Intel Core i5 750 Qaud Core Processor (2.66GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, 2.5 GT/s Bus, Socket H LGA1156)
Asus M4A785TD-V EVO AMD 785G/SB710 Socket AM3 ATX Motherboard
