AMD Radeon HD 8790M Video Card Preview

The AMD Radeon HD 8000 Series Comes to Notebooks

AMD will be launching the Radeon HD 8000 series graphics cards for both desktop and notebook PCs in 2013. AMD will be launching mobile parts first and we were sent over a Radeon HD 8790M to try out. This is the first mobile graphics processor that we have been able to get our hands on that is based on the AMD Graphics Core Next architecture.

The mobile market is healthier than the PC market and AMD appears to have a strong graphics portfolio for that market in 2013. The AMD Radeon HD 8000M series cards (code named Solar) will be launching in Q1 2013 and will be the start of rolling out AMD GCN-enabled mobile parts into all segments of the market. By the summer of 2013 all of the discrete notebook graphic card solutions from AMD will be using GCN! This means significant performance and power saving gains are coming as AMD transitions away from the VLIW5-based Radeon HD 7000M-series parts.

The AMD Radeon HD 8000M series of GPUs that will be launched in Q1 2013 will consist of the Radeon HD 8500M, 8600M, 8700M and 8800M series. These series will feature various models that are differentiated primarily by clock speeds.

AMD sent over the upcoming Radeon HD 8790M along with the Radeon HD 7690M and an adapter to try the upcoming mobile graphics processors in our lab over the holiday break. The Radeon HD 8700M series will be succeeding the Radeon HD 7600M series, so comparing the 7690M to the 8790M should be a decent look to see where we are at today and where we will be in 2013 when it comes to discrete mobile graphics performance.

Here is a look at the features of both of these mobile parts:

GPU	ALUs	Core clock	Mem. clock	Memory Bus	Memory	Fab. process	Memory Bandwidth
Radeon HD 7690M	480	600 MHz	800 MHz	128-bit	1GB GDDR5	40 nm	51.2 GB/s
Radeon HD 8790M	384	900 MHz	1000 MHz	128-bit	2GB GDDR5	28 nm	64.0 GB/s

The AMD Radeon HD 7690M that we were sent was used part number 102-C01781-00 and features Thames on the 40-nm manufacturing process. This GPU has 480 ALUs clocked at 600MHz and 1GB GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit memory interface that is clocked at 800MHz.

The back of the Radeon HD 7690M MXM laptop card is has no memory on it or anything that deserves special mention.

Next up we have the AMD Radeon HD 8790M MXM card that is code-named Mars.  This GPU is built using the latest 28-nm manufacturing process and uses a much larger GPU cooler! This Radeon HD 8790M GPU has 384 ALUs clocked at 900MHz and 2GB GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit memory interface that is clocked at 1000MHz. The Radeon HD 8790M has fewer shader ALUs than its predecessors, but remember it is built using the newer GCN architecture, has faster clock speeds and twice the GDDR5 memory.

The back of the Radeon HD 8790M MXM module has four Hynix GDDR5 memory IC's on that make up part of the cards 2GB frame buffer.

 

For testing we'll be using the AMD's development board that will allow us to run a mobile MXM video card on a desktop PCs primary PCIe x16 slot. This means we won't be testing anything on a laptop today, which isn't ideal, but it does has some benefits.  For example we'll be using a high-end desktop processor, which means that the CPU will not be a performance bottleneck. This might mean the scores of the graphics cards are higher than what you'll see in a laptop, but since we are just comparing two generations of AMD GPU's it should be fine.  We will not be covering competing mobile GPUs from NVIDIA as we are unsure if they will work properly on AMD's development board and we want our numbers to be as accurate as possible.  That said, let's take a look at the test system and then some game titles to see how the performance looks!

Test System

Before we look at the numbers, let's take a brief look at the test system that was used. All testing was done using a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running.

Drivers used for testing:

• Catalyst 12.11 Beta - All AMD Radeon HD Cards

Intel X79/LGA2011 Platform

The Intel X79 platform that we used to test the all of the video cards was running the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard with BIOS 0906 that came out on 12/22/2011. The Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz quad channel memory kit was set to 1866MHz with 1.5v and 9-10-9-27 1T memory timings. The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD was run with firmware version 2.25.

The Intel X79 Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model	Live Pricing
Processor	Intel Core i7-3960X	Click Here
Motherboard	ASUS P9X79 Deluxe	Click Here
Memory	16GB Corsair 1866MHz	Click Here
Video Card	Various	Click Here
Solid-State Drive	OCZ Vertex 3 240GB	Click Here
Cooling	Intel RTS2011LC	Click Here
Power Supply	Corsair AX1200	Click Here
Operating System	Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit	Click Here

AMD Radeon HD 8790M GPU-Z Information:

 

AMD Radeon HD 7690M GPU-Z Information:

3DMark 11

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world’s most popular benchmark for measuring the 3D graphics performance of gaming PCs. 3DMark 11 uses a native DirectX 11 engine designed to make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

We ran 3DMark11 with both the performance and extreme presets to see how our hardware will run.

3DMark11 Performance Benchmark Results:

 

Benchmark Results: The AMD Radeon HD 7690M scored 1441 3DMarks and the Radeon HD 8790M scored 2601 3DMarks in 3DMark11 with the performance preset. This makes the Radeon HD 8790M around 80% faster than the AMD Radeon HD 7690M!

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

After running benchmarks and playing games on both the AMD Radeon HD 8790M and Radeon HD 7690M we can safely say that there is a major difference between these two graphics cards. The AMD Radeon HD 8790M features GCN technology on the 28-nm manufacturing process and it easily outperforms the Radeon HD 7690M built on the 40-nm process with the TeraScale architecture.

When it comes to gaming performance the AMD Radeon HD 8790M was able to play all the game titles we tried on it and that is pretty impressive for a graphics solution that was designed for mid-range gaming notebooks. We were shocked to see how well game titles like Battlefield 3 and Far Cry 3 performed on a mainstream notebook graphics solution. Being able to play games at respectable resolutions and image quality settings is important to gamers and this card delivers.

When it comes to power consumption we found the test system used 92 Watts at idle with the Radeon HD 8790M and 94 Watts at idle with the Radeon HD 7690M. It appears the power efficiency of the Radeon HD 8790M is headed in the right direction as it was more efficient at idle, despite having twice as much memory. When at full load in the games we noticed that it used a few Watts more power, but the power versus efficiency number is much better as performance is up big and power is up just a tad.

At the end of the day performance takes a huge jump and the power numbers are right where we expected them to be. The move to Graphics Core Next is going to mean much better graphics for mobile users!

AMD will be announcing more details about the AMD Radeon 8000M series at CES 2013 and we would expect that they will have notebooks on display with the MXM cards installed in them. It will be interesting to see what mainstream notebooks will be using cards like the AMD Radeon HD 8790M and then looking at what resolution and processors these mainstream notebooks are running.

Legit Reviews will be at CES 2013, so be on the lookout for some new information on these new mobile graphics cards during the show here on LR!