AMD’s new RDNA 3 GPUs will compete with Nvidia for mid-range gaming laptops

AMD announced several new laptop GPU models at this week’s CES, along with an update to the company’s desktop and laptop CPU lineup. While not as extensive as his Nvidia laptop GPU announced earlier this week, all of these graphics chips are aimed at low-end to mid-range gaming laptops and mobile workstations. Those kind of PCs.

AMD announced seven GPUs. Four of them are new RDNA 3-based models in the mid-range 7600 and 7700 series (the remaining three are spec tweaks of existing low-end RDNA 2 laptop GPUs). The 7600 and 7700 series support the same core features as other RDNA 3 GPUs, including improved ray tracing performance and hardware accelerated encoding and decoding of the AV1 video codec. All four GPUs will be available in laptops starting in February.

There are two new GPUs here, available in four configurations. A single GPU has 32 AMD Compute Units (CUs), 2,048 shaders, and 18Gbps memory speed. The second GPU drops to 28 CUs, 1,792 shaders, and 16Gbps memory speed. Both GPUs share an 8GB pool of GDDR6 memory, a 128-bit memory interface, and his 32MB of AMD’s Infinity cache.

The 32 CU chip will be sold as both the RX 7600M XT and RX 7700S. The 28 CU chips are marketed as RX 7600M and RX 7600S. The difference between M-series and S-series is that the maximum power range of S GPUs is slightly lower than that of M chips. Maintain and compensate clock speed.

AMD compared the 7600M XT favorably to the desktop version of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060, showing it to outperform the 3060 (and the older RX 6600M) by a wide margin in a wide range of games.That’s all fine, but I’ve changed my laptop GPU to Other laptop GPUs May be more relevant to potential buyers.

As for the S series, AMD has shown that the 7700S outperforms its predecessor, the 6700S, but has not provided a direct comparison to the Nvidia GPUs. AMD also showed results for a mostly different set of games, making it difficult to compare the 7700S and 7600M XT. However, a handful of games run on both GPUs showed nearly identical results at the same 1080p graphics settings.

The dedicated RDNA 3 GPU will be joined by an as-yet-unnamed RDNA 3-based integrated GPU on the Ryzen 7040 processor. With up to 12 CUs and reliance on shared system memory, it’s nowhere near the 7600S or 7600M, but it should definitely be a step up from the older AMD integrated GPUs and Intel’s aging Iris Xe integrated GPUs.

AMD has yet to announce a high-end laptop GPU to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4080 and 4090 series laptop GPUs announced earlier this week.

Nvidia could also see the RTX 4000 series showing greater power efficiency advantages over RDNA 3 based GPUs in its desktop version testing. Nvidia has hinted at a 40 W RTX 4000 laptop GPU with the same performance as the laptop RTX 3070 while AMD is talking about a mid-range GPU with power figures in the 50-120 W range. That said, we’ll have to wait and see how these GPUs compare in real laptop designs. Based on how laptops are designed, performance can vary considerably between laptops with the same components.

Of the three RDNA 2 based GPUs introduced by AMD, the RX 6550M and RX 6450M are hardly improved versions of the existing RX 6500 and RX 6400 respectively. The number of CUs, 4GB memory size, 64-bit memory interface, and other most important hardware specs are all the same. Both outperform lower-end integrated GPUs for budget gaming laptops.

The third RDNA 2 GPU is the RX 6550S. Like other S-series GPUs, this is the version with the lower minimum power limit of the RX 6550M (50 W to 35 W), helping it fit into smaller designs.

Exhibition image by AMD