Integrated AMD Radeon 680M GPU (RDNA architecture) Beats GeForce MX450 Discrete Graphics Cards

A detailed review of the upcoming AMD Ryzen 6000 APUs has been published on the Zhihu platform. The review was prepared by an engineer worki...

A detailed review of the upcoming AMD Ryzen 6000 APUs has been published on the Zhihu platform. The review was prepared by an engineer working at the Lenovo Notebook Division in China. At the same time, the issues of APU energy efficiency, battery life, and integrated GPU performance were considered in detail.

The AMD Ryzen 6000 series is based on the updated Zen3+ processor architecture and also includes an improved graphics subsystem with the RDNA2 microarchitecture. RDNA2 offers better performance and ray tracing support. At the same time, the integrated GPU can include up to 12 computing units. The processors are manufactured using the 6nm process technology.

The Zhihu review demonstrates the potential of the Radeon 600M graphics subsystem in comparison with the GeForce MX450 discrete graphics card (GP107 video chip based on Pascal architecture) designed for use in ultra-thin notebooks. With the advent of RDNA2-based iGPUs, these solutions are likely to be phased out of the market as they are replaced by integrated graphics.

In 3DMark tests, the Radeon 680M is faster than the 25W GeForce MX450. AMD's integrated solution offers the best performance in almost all tests. At the same time, the RDNA2-based GPU supports ray tracing. This feature is not available on AMD Ryzen 4000/5000 or Intel Xe-LP GPUs built into Alder Lake mobile processors.

The review also touches on the topic of GPU efficiency given the TDP configuration. It is noted that the iGPU Radeon 680M with a default TDP of 25W can get an additional 38% performance boost simply by increasing the TDP to 42W. But in the case of a stripped-down version of the Radeon 660M, when going from 25W to 42W, the performance gain reaches only 9%.

ComputerBase, which tests a laptop with a Ryzen 6000 APU, noticed that the Radeon 680M graphics in 3DMark Port Royal are faster than the mobile discrete version of the GeForce RTX 3050. This is a ray tracing test that uses hardware acceleration blocks found in both NVIDIA Ampere and in AMD RDNA2. However, in the case of the NVIDIA solution, only 4 GB of memory is available, which is simply not enough for this test. This limitation does not apply to an AMD Radeon 680M iGPU attached to system memory.

Overall, the Radeon 600M GPU delivers better performance than the GeForce MX450 (25W) and Intel Xe-LP (Core i7-11370H) in 1080p tests. Performance is not yet on par with the GTX 1650 Max-Q, but unlike the GTX series, AMD's RDNA2 GPU supports ray-tracing (if that ever matters in this performance segment).

The company is expected to introduce the Ryzen 6000G desktop APU line by the end of the year. Thanks to the increase in frequency, the desktop version of the Rembrandt APU will be able to compete with the graphics cards of the GTX 16 line.