The TechReport and TomsHardware have posted benchmarks for the new mobile AMD Radeon 8790M part – which has not been released for us yet, but should be out in 2013Q1. The benchmarks were not conducted with with a mobile system, but with a desktop system, so the results probably won’t be the same as in mobile systems, but they will reflect the performance differences between the 7690M and the 8790M and give us some idea of the 8790M performance.
Now, the comparison to the 7690M is also a reference comparison to cards of the same level, like the GT 555M, GT 635M and GT 640M.
OK, some raw data (thanks TechReport):
| GPU | ALUs | Core clock |
Mem. clock |
Mem. interface width |
Memory | Fab. process |
Die size |
| Radeon HD 7690M | 480 | 600 MHz | 800 MHz | 128-bit | 1GB GDDR5 | 40 nm | 118 mm² |
| Radeon HD 8790M | 384 | 900 MHz | 1000 MHz | 128-bit | 2GB GDDR5 | 28 nm | ~76.5 mm² |
You can see that the number of ALUs is lower (80%), but actually, the 7690M belongs to the VLIW5 architecture and the 8790M belongs to the new GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture so we can really say something really accurate from these numbers, expect the fact that the 7690M is a 7670M which a GDDR5 memory (and sometimes higher core clocks).
AMD also had produced some VLIW4 GPUs because they thought there won’t be a serious performance hit – read here for thorough information on both the VLIW4/5 and GCN and in simple words – the 7690M 480 ALUs vs 8790M 384 ALUs shouldn’t scare you since you don’t really lose anything in practice (but this statement is not “scientific”).
Moreover, you can see that the 8790M core and memory clocks are much higher and the die size is much smaller. The TechReport power consumption tests show that the 8790M doesn’t consume more power (well, 2W more in load) and this is thanks to the technological advancements.
Now, for some real results:
I didn’t add the settings and drivers info, but you can read it on TechReport’s article. Generally, they used updated drivers and used reasonable settings for comparison:
| Game | 7690M | 8790M |
| BattleField 3 | 31 | 49 |
| Borderlands 2 | 28 | 44 |
| Far Cry 3 | 29 | 42 |
| Hitman: Absolution | 22 | 41 |
| Sleeping Dogs | 31 | 47 |
It is quite obvious that the 8790M is far superior here. 50% advantage is easily expected across the board and there isn’t any real competition. TechReport article show another finding – the occurrence of frames which it takes a long time to render is much much lower, meaning you’ll have far less stuttering and lags and so on.
Conclusion – there is a reason to wait.
