My Homelab NAS is for storage: it has two 4TB NVMe drives (for 8TB of usable space). It has NO graphics card. It does, however, have an AMD Ryzen 7600 6-core CPU. This comes with integrated graphics which begs the question: can it play PC games?
It’s clearly NOT an APU (like the Ryzen 8000G series of CPUs) but surely it can play SOME games, right? Well in this video I find out, by benchmarking the Ryzen 7600 CPU in four resolutions (4k, 1440p, 1080p and 720p) in five games:
- Skyrim
- The Witcher 2
- OG Crysis
- Rocket League
- FFX HD Remastered
If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.
Video Transcript And Guide
Hey everyone! My Homelab NAS that I built a few months ago is designed for storage to help with my video editing. It has no graphics card, but it does contain a Ryzen 7600 CPU which comes with integrated graphics. This got me thinking: can I play PC games on this?
To be clear, this is not an APU; it’s not meant for gaming. So I was actually kind of surprised I could sort of play some games on this, including modern games like Rocket League. I also jumped into nostalgia land and played OG Crisis, Witcher 2, Skyrim, and Final Fantasy 10 HD Remaster, which is my favorite game ever. It’s the GOAT! It sends me; it’s such a mood. (Sorry, I’m working on my Gen Z slang.)
Let’s dive into the gaming results. I tested each game at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, and 720p. Spoiler alert: 4K gaming on this Ryzen 7600 CPU is not really fun.
Skyrim
I booted up Skyrim, and it had all my old save files on the cloud from 2013, which is pretty cool. So I booted into one of them, and 4K looked pretty good, admittedly, but it was a slideshow with single-digit FPS. I’ll show it on screen just so we can see it a bit easier: 6-8 FPS, not very good. But a lot of the effects were turned up here; I probably could have gotten double-digit FPS. Maybe the flames look pretty good there.
Now I’m immaturely shooting a guard with an arrow, which you always have to do in a game like this, don’t you? Sorry, Mr. Guard! What are you doing? What’s that? You want an arrow to the knee? Happy to oblige! Oh sorry, uh-oh. Bounty! Run away!
Now it’s time to go over to 1440p. If you look at that, I’m getting around 16 FPS, 15 FPS. Was that cat? No, it wasn’t. Lydia, what— Don’t know what that was. Anyway, the point is, yeah, 15-16 FPS. It’s not too bad, but again, not very playable. But considering this is on a CPU, that’s not too bad.
If we look outside, the FPS rates stay around the same, sometimes sitting at 20. You can see RAM usage here is around 93% full, which actually means there’s no RAM bottleneck here. The bottleneck is entirely with the integrated graphics part of the CPU being maxed out, as you can see it’s 100%.
So now we go over to 1080p, and it’s actually half-decent results now. It’s getting over 30 FPS regularly when outside. And no, I don’t know what the idiot’s doing there. I heard you were… and that was a terrible shot, but let’s try again. Sorry, you can tell it’s a save game, can’t you? When I do stuff like this, I know it’s harsh, but sometimes I just like to create carnage and then sit back and see what happens. Go on, Lydia… Don’t worry, Lydia, I’ll help. I’ll shoot some arrows. I’ve got your back! Oh wait, ah, nope. Okay, time to go to 720p.
At 720p, it’s actually pretty good. It’s often getting 50 to 60 FPS, as you can see, and things are a lot blurrier now because this is a 4K monitor ultimately. But the FPS rates are fairly good. You can see again the integrated graphics part of the CPU is just completely maxed out. If we go outside, yeah, things continue to be similar with fairly high FPS rates around 58… 60… So that’s actually pretty cool, I think.
In terms of the results, it’s unplayable at 4K, but then 1440p, 1080p, and 720p are better, which I think is pretty cool for integrated graphics. Yes, this is a fairly old game, but I think these are actually pretty good results.
The Witcher 2
Now we come to The Witcher 2, which at 4K was absolutely terrible. I mean, the FPS rates were one or two, sometimes even zero with no frames being rendered. It was pretty unplayable. It averaged around two, I would say, but I won’t subject you to this anymore. So let’s look at 1440p instead.
Good-looking graphics, I did have a lot of effects on, but yeah, it was single-digit FPS rates a lot of the time. It wasn’t exactly fun. So I went down to 1080p, and it was more playable. As you can see, you’re getting almost 20 FPS at some times, although it was probably more like averaging 12-13 FPS, I’d say. So not exactly great either. It was very juddering.
But at 720p, it was actually a lot better. It was around 30 FPS a lot of the time, and yeah, it was playable. Not exactly the best graphics considering the scale to 4K, but not too bad. Killed everyone, woohoo! Great! Who shot me? Uh, it’s always the archer, isn’t it? Come on, don’t shoot me again. Avoid him, avoid him, and I’m just going to keep clicking my mouse to kill him. Come on, click, click, click. Yes, done! Woohoo!
So in terms of the results, The Witcher 2 did not perform as well as Skyrim. As you can see, it wasn’t really playable at anything other than 720p on the Ryzen 7600 CPU.
OG Crysis
Now we come to Crysis, and it looks pretty good as expected. Even though it’s quite an old game, it looks really awesome, but the FPS rate is really slow. As you can see when I zoom in here, it’s around 2 or 3 FPS. The RAM itself is fairly low usage; it’s just the integrated graphics part of the CPU that is maxed out. But this is a slideshow, so I’m going to move on to 1440p.
This is me just out at sea. I absolutely love this part, and you can see FPS rates are around double digits, around 10 FPS, but it’s still not great really. At 1080p, things are a lot more playable. You get above 20 FPS rate a lot of the time, and the graphics still look pretty good, although there is some screen tearing here which I wasn’t sure why that was. I did play around with some of the settings, but I couldn’t make it go away, to be honest. But overall, as you can see, FPS rates are above 20, which is sort of playable, and it looks fairly good.
Then at 720p, the frame rates are really good, and I decided to kill everyone by hitting them for some reason. I don’t know why, but yeah, you can see it’s all fairly smooth. FPS rates are dipping down there because there’s a lot of effects and a lot of things going on, but this is actually pretty good considering it’s all on an integrated CPU.
In terms of the results, you can see things aren’t really playable at 4K or 1440p. Then they are pretty playable actually at 1080p with 20+ FPS rates, and then at 720p, it’s really playable actually, and it looked fairly good. There was not as much blur at 720p as there was with Skyrim.
Rocket League
Then we come to Rocket League, but unfortunately, it just wasn’t loading at first. What would happen is the loader would start appearing, and then sometimes it would go to full-screen mode as though it was about to boot up the game, but then it would just crash and die. I tracked this down to it just not liking the 4K resolution.
But at 1440p, things were a bit better, and the FPS rates were above 20 FPS, which is actually pretty good. And then at 1080p, FPS rates go up even more, and they’re often getting between 25 and 30, which I think is actually pretty good considering Rocket League is a fairly modern game. Yes, just about scored! Two seconds left on the clock!
At 720p now, FPS rates are often above 40. Hopefully, I scored. Yes, that was actually a fairly decent hit, and yeah, 40 FPS, quite good.
If we look at the Rocket League results now, you can see that at 4K, it just didn’t play. 1440p was sort of playable with a 19 FPS rate average, but at 1080p and 720p, it was very playable. That was actually really impressive results.
FFX HD Remaster
And now we come to Final Fantasy HD, which was my favorite game ever. But unfortunately, at 4K, it just wasn’t really playable at all. It was a complete slideshow, 2 or 3 FPS mainly. The RAM usage wasn’t that high. This was just yet another case of the integrated graphics being exhausted for this CPU.
At 1440p, we started off with a weird cropped mode for some reason, but ignoring that, the frame rates were at least in double digits: 11, 12, 13 FPS often. And it looked a lot smoother. At least it was playable, but it still wasn’t great. Clearly, this isn’t a great FPS result, and it did drop down below 10 sometimes.
So at 1080p, things were a little bit better. At least they often were above 20 FPS, dipping to 15 to 16 at its lowest, which is a little bit disappointing. I thought it would actually hold up a little bit better than this.
At 720p, things were a lot better, getting around 30 FPS. RAM usage is fairly low, and again, it’s mainly just the integrated graphics part of the CPU that is completely maxed out. Every so often, frame rates would dip down a little bit from 28 FPS, but in general, this averaged at 29 FPS but often stayed around 29-30.
If we look at the results, then things weren’t really playable at all at 4K or 1440p, which surprised me, and even at 1080p, it wasn’t very good results either. It was only really at 720p that it had half-decent FPS results.
Conclusion
If we look at the results for all games, it’s a bit hard to show on a chart but really 4K wasn’t playable with anything. 1440p was at least playable a little bit with Skyrim and Rocket League. 1080p then, you had OG Crisis which was playable as well, but then at 720p everything was fairly playable. So kind of a mixed bag of results, but at least with some games things were playable at 1080P and even 1440p which surprised me a little bit.
So there you have it. Yes, you can play games on a mid-range CPU like the Ryzen 7600, but clearly, it’s not a good experience, and you won’t be able to play really modern AAA games released in the last few years or even decade. But this isn’t meant to be a gaming chip; it’s mainly to power the operating system’s desktop GUI. The fact that it can actually run some games at 1080p was a pleasant surprise to me.
I tracked all of the FPS stats in FPS Monitor, which is a paid tool, but there are loads of FPS trackers you can try. I discuss them all in another video if you want to check that out.
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