New AMD Ryzen APUs may offer a GPU fix during the global shortage

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If you're allowed to buy one.

AMD Ryzen 5000 Mobile
(Image credit: AMD)

Can't pick up a graphics card? AMD might have a temporary, if slightly underwhelming, solution. The AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs have once again reared their heads, this time on what appears to be an OEM component list, which suggests these chips could arrive sooner rather than later. While far from the power of an RX 6900 XT, these could provide much needed GPU silicon in a pinch.

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That means we're almost certainly looking at a maximum graphics loadout of eight cores of integrated GPU power, built with an architecture close to that of the Vega generation.

Granted, that's not much, but it is a GPU capable of pushing decent 720p graphics in most games and solid 1080p performance in the least demanding ones. The benefit here being the recent GPU shortage makes it difficult to get much else without paying over the odds for it. These Ryzen APUs will offer you something graphics-wise, and at least tangible gaming framerates. More so than Intel's iGPUs, anyways.

An APU wouldn't necessarily preclude the opportunity for a discrete GPU upgrade down the line either.

But there's a catch: AMD didn't sell its Ryzen 4000-series APUs direct to customers. Instead, these were available only via OEMs in prebuilt systems. So far the company has not said whether the Ryzen 5000-series APUs will be the same.

Here's hoping AMD brings back the DIY APUs. We''re still recommending the Ryzen 5 3400G of yesteryear for our GPU-less budget PC build, which is a great chip if a little tough to find in stock, but it would be great to bump that up to an eight-core chip in 2021.

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Jacob Ridley
Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.