AMD Radeon 780M Integrated RDNA 3 GPU Makes A Pass At 3DMark, Here's How It Did
by
Zak Killian
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Friday, February 03, 2023, 02:52 PM EDT
At CES 2023, AMD finally unveiled its "Phoenix" family of what would have once been called "Accelerated Processing Units." Sporting up to eight Zen 4 CPU cores, six RDNA 3 workgroup processors, and a special XDNA AI engine all in a monolithic 4nm die, these chips have high potential to be awesome for laptops and SFF PCs. Well, we just got a glimpse of that potential from "Golden Pig Upgrade" on Bilibili.
Regular readers will recall that when we reviewed the Alienware m17 R5, one of the things we were most impressed by was the performance of the Ryzen 9 6900HX's integrated Radeon 680M. That laptop had a seriously beefy Radeon discrete GPU, but a clever gamer would save power by running lightweight games on the integrated GPU due to its potency. Given the improvements in RDNA 3, we're expecting big things from the Radeon 780M.
The Chinese enthusiast shared a couple of early benchmarks of a Ryzen 9 7940HS with pre-release drivers. The benchmarks were done using 3DMark Time Spy, and conveniently, the tester had HWiNFO open for us to view as well. The first benchmark, just above, was run with the processor set to its full 54W power limit, while the second benchmark (further below) was run with the power limit at just 25W.
Most of the loss at the lower power limit appears to be CPU performance. This makes sense considering that these SoCs can shift power between CPU and GPU where it is needed, and that the driver will likely favor GPU power over CPU. At 54W, the Ryzen 9 7940HS' eight Zen 4 CPU cores put out a pretty impressive 11,343 CPU score, and at 25W that value falls to 8,448.
That score is pretty similar to the results of Ryzen 6000 processors, but remember that a huge portion of the desktop Zen 4 CPUs' performance gain over the previous-generation parts is down to increased clock rate. That isn't going to come through on a mobile platform. It's still matching up pretty well with 45W CPUs like the Ryzen 9 6900HS despite being limited to 25W.
On the other hand, the Time Spy graphics score loses less than 300 points by dropping almost half of the SoC's power budget. The 25W score, 2486 points, hangs tough with the best non-overclocked Radeon 680M results, and the full-power score brushes up against even significantly-overclocked systems. Pretty impressive considering that this apparently isn't even its final performance, as stated explicitly by Golden Pig Upgrade. In fact, this result seems to be very similar to the extant RDNA 2 parts when you take into account the Radeon 780M's sky-high 2.8 GHz boost clock.
We found the Radeon 680M to have credible 1080p gaming performance, with superior GPU and CPU power compared to Valve's Steam Deck. A 16% performance uplift from clock rate alone would still make the Radeon 780M the fastest integrated GPU around, for sure—at least until Meteor Lake launches. Ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 on IGP, anyone? Laptops with these parts should start shipping in March.