Recently I wrote about how the demise of the budget GPU posed a big problem for PC gaming, namely that having to spend an extra $100 to $200 just to buy the cheapest GPU would be a serious hurdle for many gamers who simply don't have as much as others. Without newer budget models to replace older ones, these gamers would inevitably get left behind, finding their options to be inadequate for the latest and even sort of recent PC games. It could even harm the PC gaming ecosystem as a whole if these gamers are squeezed out of PC and switch to consoles.

A surprisingly common counterpoint to my article that I didn't expect was the idea that CPUs with fast integrated graphics (namely AMD's Ryzen APUs) would be able to fill the void left by low-end cards in both performance and value. Obviously, I disagree with this idea completely, and while the next generation of AMD and Intel graphics are rumored to be much faster than what we have today, I'm very confident that budget gamers are much worse off with integrated graphics than discrete GPUs.

APUs have terrible value for graphics performance

When it comes to value, low-end graphics cards tend to not be amazing (a GPU can only be so cheap after all) but APUs are even worse. This might sound weird because you've probably heard that APUs are actually great when it comes to bang for buck, and that's sort of true. Most Ryzen APUs have launched at or below the $250 price point, with the most expensive being the 8-core 5700G at over $300. These chips come with good CPU cores and relatively fast integrated graphics, so what's the problem? Well, it's the CPU half that's the issue, not the GPU half.

Every time you buy an APU, you're not buying just integrated graphics, but a CPU too. It goes without saying that the CPU part of the APU increases the price, especially since most of the space in an APU is taken up by the CPU cores, memory controllers, and other things that a CPU needs. Yet APUs also tend to be larger than low-end graphics chips, meaning they're more expensive to produce while also having much less silicon dedicated to graphics horsepower. Most of the money you're spending on an APU is for the CPU, not the GPU.

APUs are a great purchase for people on a budget exactly once. The whole idea is that you start with an APU and then get an actual graphics card when you can afford one. But if APUs are the only thing budget gamers can afford to buy, then they have to essentially buy both a new GPU and CPU every single time they want to upgrade, which is just a waste of money. We would never accept this system for more expensive PCs or even midrange desktops, so surely it can't be an acceptable alternative for budget PC builds either.

Traditional integrated graphics are much slower than even the slowest low-end cards

I sort of got the argument that APUs are affordable therefore they can replace low-end graphics cards. Sure, it doesn't really make sense under scrutiny, but the fundamental idea isn't totally wrong since APUs are a good first step for making budget PCs. But I was truly baffled when I read comments that not only were APUs affordable, but that they were even going to replace low-end GPUs in raw performance as well, or that they even already have. This one is simply not up for debate: integrated graphics won't outdo discrete graphics pretty much ever.

Today, the fastest integrated GPU is AMD's RDNA3-based Radeon 780M, present in the fastest 5nm Ryzen 7040 APUs including the Z1 that powers the ROG Ally. Meanwhile, AMD's latest lowest-end card is the $150 RX 6400, which has the same amount of GPU cores but uses the older RDNA2 architecture and 6nm node. Yet in 3DMark Time Spy, the RX 6400 is about 40% faster. Keep in mind, the 780M is what you get with the highest-end Ryzen 7040 APUs, and if they ever come to the desktop, I would imagine the top-end model would cost at least $300.

The 780M uses a better manufacturing process, a better architecture, and even boosts at a much higher clock speed, so how could it lose so hard? Well, it's the size: you need lots of room to make a high performance processor. One of the things that the 780M simply doesn't have room for is cache. The 6400 has 16MB of L3 cache when the 780M doesn't even have L3 cache, just 2MB of L2. As we've learned in the past three or so years, cache is great for boosting performance in gaming GPUs.

If you look at a spec sheet though, you might be incredulous at the idea that there's not enough room. After all, the full Ryzen 7040 APU is 178mm2 large, while the RX 6400 is just 107mm2. Well, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier: APUs also come with CPU cores. The ultimate problem for APUs is that they're CPUs with integrated graphics, not GPUs with integrated CPU cores. The graphics are hobbled by not having much cache, having to use slow DDR memory rather than GDDR, and being very limited in size. Graphics performance just isn't the main priority.

It won't change for the next generation of integrated graphics either, because they're not going to get much bigger (if at all) nor use dedicated memory nor have some magic that somehow negates those two problems. Neither will we see the kind of large APUs that come in the Xbox or Playstation, because those would require massive sockets that just don't make sense for mainstream motherboards, and again, they would lose to discrete graphics with comparable specs. There is no fast APU that can match low-end GPUs, and there never will be.

APUs are not a real alternative for budget gaming GPUs

If low-end GPUs die out, then APUs would naturally have to replace them. It clearly wouldn't be an improvement though, it's just the natural consequence of removing a whole tier of graphics cards from the market. Poorer PC gamers were already getting kind of a bad deal with low-end GPUs since they usually had worse value than midrange models, but if they have to buy APUs to get newer and affordable hardware, then that's just appalling.

Budget PC gamers are not going to accept APUs as a real alternative to low-end cards. They're going to eventually quit PC gaming and just switch to consoles, which offer much more affordable hardware and compelling performance. Think it won't affect you if these gamers leave the community? The latest hardware survey from Steam says about 10% of users have the GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, and 1650. That's just three low-end GPUs, and they make up 10% of the largest PC gaming community today. PC gaming can't afford to lose that many people.