AMD is temporarily withdrawing from the high-end desktop graphics card market, but it is about to introduce its flagship mobile GPU. After several years of absence from the discrete mobile GPU market and a largely unnoticed presence, Team Red is back with its big guns (the biggest so far): The Radeon RX 7900M.
The Radeon RX 7900M will launch alongside the Alienware m18 “AMD Advantage” Edition gaming laptop. Featuring the Navi 31 core and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, it will be the 1440p mobile GPU to beat, at least in raster games. A leaked Geekbench test allows us to draw a preliminary picture of the performance of the RDNA 3 mobile flagship.
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The Radeon RX 7900M is based on a heavily scaled down Navi 31 chip with just 4,609 shaders and a 256-bit bus. As for the mobile GeForce RTX 4090, it is a desktop version of the RTX 4080 with 9,728 cores and a 256-bit bus. And yet, in the Vulkan Compute bench, the Radeon RX 7900M scores 171,430 points, about the same score as the mobile GeForce RTX 4090, which tends to be in the 170 xxx range.
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As we explained previously, the performance of laptop CPUs and GPUs tends to vary greatly between manufacturers. Sometimes the same GPU can perform as a higher-tier variant if it has adequate cooling, and vice versa. This is what we can hope for here too. After all, a GeForce RTX 4080 is going up against a Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
AMD's RDNA 3 family has been heavily criticized for its poor power efficiency. Not only did it fail to meet its 3GHz clock target, it failed to achieve it even with a high power budget. If the Radeon RX 7900M can deliver performance comparable to the RTX 4090 mobile, it will be a remarkable achievement for the Radeon mobile team.