AMD is gearing up to release its Ryzen 8000G-series accelerated processing units for desktops with built-in RDNA 3-based GPU, and the latter tend to be hungry for memory bandwidth. PCWorld decided to ask AMD whether users buying advanced versions of AMD’s next-generation desktop APUs should also buy expensive memory kits for their new rigs to avoid any performance bottlenecks for built-in Radeon GPUs. The company explained that its Ryzen 8000G will be fine with a dual-channel DDR5-6000 memory subsystem. 

“So, first thing is dual-channel RAM, absolute must, that is a huge bandwidth advantage,” Donny Woligroski, Technical Marketing Manager at AMD, told PCWorld. “Do not skimp, you gotta have dual-channel. DDR5-6000 is pretty cheap nowadays. If you can do dual-channel DDR5-6000, you are gonna hit those great frame rates and really playable performance and that is definitely that we will steer people.”

Meanwhile, 96 GB/s does not seem to be a lot for a decent iGPU. AMD’s Ryzen 7 8700G is expected to feature the company’s range-topping RDNA 3-based Radeon 780M integrated GPU with 768 stream processors. The mobile version of the Radeon 780M can operate at clocks between 800 MHz and 2700 MHz, thus offering FP32 performance of up to 8.29 TFLOPS, making it a powerful graphics processor. To add some context, AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 XT features a peak FP32 performance of 8.928 TFLOPS and boasts a 256 GB/s peak memory bandwidth and 32 MB of Infinity Cache. 

Meanwhile, we should remember that the performance of virtually all high-performance integrated GPUs is constrained by memory bandwidth, so AMD and Intel are in the same boat here. Therefore, AMD’s Ryzen 8000G promises to be very competitive regarding graphics performance. A Ryzen 7 8700G-based rig should also not be too expensive as one can grab a 32 GB DDR5-6000 dual-channel kit for less than $100.

Another advantage of AMD’s Ryzen 8000G APUs is that they are part of the AM5 platform, which the company promised to support for the next few years.