GPU Battle: Radeon HD 7660G vs Radeon HD 7670M vs GT 630M

“Actually, the performance of the 7660G is too close to the 630M and 7670M to justify a premium”

 

Entry midrange GPUs battle. The Radeon HD 7660G found in the Trinity A10-4600M CPU, the Radeon HD 7670M which is actually a rebranded Radeon HD 6650M and the GT 630M which is actually a rebranded GT 540M. You can find them all in laptops of the same price range more or less, competing with each other like it’s the only thing that matters in the world.

Well, first lets see some dry info.

 

Model	Core, shaders (vertex / geometry / pixel)	memory and bandwidth	Core speed
Radeon HD 7670M	Thames XT, 480 unified : 24 : 8, 40nm process	DDR3@900MHZ,  28.8GB/s	600MHZ
GT 630M / GT 540M	Fermi (GF108), 96 unified : 16 : 8, 40nm/28nm process	DDR3@900MHZ, 28.8GB/s	672MHZ
Radeon HD 7660G (A10-4600M)	Trinity, 384 unified : 24 : 8, 32nm process	System memory	497 – 686 MHz

The 7660G is based on the newer VLIW4 architecture and the 7670M / 6650M on the older VLIW5 architecture. Performance for the same clock and with the same memory bandwidth should be at least similar in most cases between the VLIW4 and VLIW5 and sometimes the newer and improves VLIW4 chips should have an advantage.

 

Performance

Now, for actual performance. Based on numbers from HotHardware, notebookcheck and Anandtech we can say that the Radeon HD 7670M and GT 630M are averagely of the same performance level. Of course, the performance you’ll get depends also on drivers and the system used.

Now, as for the 7660G against the GT 630M / HD 7670M – we have to remember that the 7660G does not come as a dedicated GPU, but as a part of a whole APU with the A10-4600M CPU. The A10-4600M cores are slower than the (more or less) equally clocked Intel I5 cpus usually used for the 630M and 7670M benchmarks and thus, the results we see do not show the 7660G GPU potential itself plus, I do believe that as drivers will get more mature, we’ll see better performance.

That being said, in 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Vantage  GPU Performance scores, the 7660G is positioned around the GT 630M (link). The actual FPS numbers in games, however, show that the difference between the GT 630M (OC’ed version, at least) and the 7660G can get as high as 50%  like in portal 2 (768p resolution, medium settings) and “Batman: Arkham City“. But averagely, even with a fast I5 or I7, the GT 630M would be only 10%-20% faster. Interesting enough, the 7660G comes very close to the GT 630M and 7670M in many heavy duty titles, like BF3, Skyrim and more. Additionally, AMD 7660G has – probably – a significant advantage over Nvidias’ GPUs in Civilization V and the 7660G actually equals the GT 630M.

Actually, the performance of the 7660G is too close to the 630M and 7670M to justify any premium. Keep in mind that the A10-4600M chip TDP is 35W – it includes both a fast quad core cpu and a very good GPU, so you would probably get a better  battery performance with one of this compared to some of the older cpus, like the I3.

 

Conclusion

 

The A10-4600M + 7660G combination will give you a lot for your money, if you can get it for a good price. There is no need to try and find some 7670M / GT 630M equipped laptops if you don’t really need the extra performance. True, You’ll find it hard to find an A10-4600M laptops for less than 500$ and for that price you can get the 7670M or GT 630M anyway, but the point is that sometimes you can find the laptop you want with an A10-4600M cpu while you won’t find what you want with a GT 630M or Radeon 7670M.

A good deal of a A10-4600M laptop should be in the 500$ range.

 

If you are wondering how’s the 7660G competes with AMD’s previous generation 6620G or Intel’s HD 4000, read here.