HP ENVY 6 Sleekbook Review; AMD's Mobile Trinity APU Arrives

GPU Compute Benchmarks

With many CPUs using integrated graphics processors, parallel co-processing has become a hot topic of conversation. More and more applications now include support for OpenCL, DirectCompute and other features which help speed up performance in order to quickly finish certain tasks.

In this section, we will be benchmarking a number of applications which support (or claim to support) GPU compute in an effort to highlight the performance benefits which come with this technology.

Photoshop CS6

In our previous Photoshop CS6 benchmark, we deliberately disabled the GPU acceleration features so we could get an apples to apples CPU comparison. However, in this test, we are enabling that acceleration to see what affect it has upon the benchmark numbers. Please remember: Photoshop’s GPU features only improve performance on SOME (rather than all) editing tools so performance will not scale in a linear fashion due to the CPU still playing a role.

WinZip 16.5

As of version 16.5, WinZip now supports OpenCL acceleration for some of its file compression features. Unfortunately, it only works on AMD’s graphics processors for the time being. In this test, we compressed (using the maximum compression routine) a 2.6GB folder with random files and logged the time it took to complete.


As we can see, if the right applications are chosen and GPU acceleration is enabled, the AMD APU within HP’s Envy 6 can really shine. Unfortunately, only a few programs currently feature OpenCL or other forms of compute support but the list is expanding at a rapid pace as both AMD and Intel begin focusing on this area.