AMD's 8000 series desktop APUs are nearing launch. Motherboard BIOSes are ready and samples are available.

Actual gaming performance is still an unknown quantity, but Geekbench entries and the known performance of similar mobile APUs give us an idea of what to expect.

The Ryzen 5 8600G was listed in the Geekbench database (found by Tom's Hardware). According to it, the Radeon 760M integrated graphics scored 30,770 and 24,842 in the Vulkan and OpenCL benchmarks, respectively; the Vulkan score is notable in that it beat out the very popular Nvidia GTX 1060. This may not seem particularly impressive when compared to the current generation of mid-range discrete graphics cards, but it is very impressive for an integrated solution. Of course, the 760M consumes much less power than the GTX 1060, and with slightly lower settings, it should be sufficient to play all modern games at 1080p.

The Ryzen 7 8700G (found by Videocardz) has more powerful Radeon 780M graphics, scoring 35,427 points in the Vulkan benchmark and 29,244 points in the OpenCL benchmark. This is at the GTX 1650 level. Not bad. Not bad at all.

It should be noted that synthetic results are not the final conclusion of gaming performance. For integrated graphics, memory speed in particular has a big impact on performance, and AMD's AM5 socket supports only DDR5 memory, which definitely helps.

Both the 8600G and 8700G integrated graphics are based on the RDNA 3 architecture. This is three generations ahead of the Vega-based integrated graphics in the 5000 series APUs. It is not a leap to assume that this new chip will be much faster than its latest desktop predecessor. Besides, the 8600G has six Zen 4 cores and the 8700G has eight. On paper, these would be capable all-rounders.

Both chips are worth looking at if your budget doesn't stretch to a discrete graphics card, or if you want to add one later. 8600G and 8700G are expected to be announced at CES in the coming days. A less expensive model will likely be announced as well, but it will not be a particularly strong gaming option.