The First Benchmarks That Claim To Reveal The Graphics Performance Of A New AMD APU Have Just Surfaced Online.
The code name of the new APU is AMD Phoenix, branded in the 7040 series. Its chip has a 780M graphics core that uses RNDA graphics technology.
APU is an integrated chip consisting of two central processors and graphics. APU stands for Accelerated processing unit, which was first introduced in 2011 by AMD. This company has been researching its development since 2006.
AMD’s new 780M APU graphics core performs about 25 percent faster than the 680M used in the Ryzen 6000 APU. However, that’s not even the highlight of AMD’s new APU. The upside of AMD’s latest APU is that it’s almost twice as fast as AMD’s GPU in the Steam Deck.
A closer look at AMD’s new APU benchmark
AMD‘s new APU was benchmarked by 3DMark Time Spy, and according to a post on Bilibili, AMD’s latest 780M APU GPU scored around 3000 points in the benchmark.
In comparison, the last generation, 680M, scored around 2400 points, and the main attraction is that the Steam Deck scored around 1700 points. So, AMD’s new APU is about 2x faster than Steam Deck, the king of portable gaming.
The Nvidia GTX 1060 graphics processor reaches 4200 points in this benchmark. And RTX 2050 Mobile is around 3200 points. On the other hand, the RTX 3060 has 9000 points, while the RTX 4080 is at 14835 points.
So, the closest GPU to the new AMD 780M would be the mobile RTX 2050. However, you cannot forget that we are talking about an APU. So, the most exciting comparison would be between the Steam Deck APU and, if you didn’t know, the Steam Deck console APU is also made by AMD.
AMD 780M specifications
AMD’s new APU comes with 768 RDNA, three shader cores, and 32 render outputs. Its maximum clock speed can reach up to 2.9 GHz, and its maximum processing performance is 8.9 TFLOPS. On the other hand, Steam Deck has 512 shader cores with RDNA specifications. It has 16 rendering outputs, while its processing performance is 3.3 TFLOPS.
AMD’s new APU score of 8.9 teraflops is a little eye-catching. It depends on RDNA 3’s complex dual-pumping shader architecture. Therefore, in real-world scenarios, it may not always provide double performance.
Given that, it’s safe to say that the actual raw shader performance of AMD’s new APU is around 4.5 teraflops.
The screen resolution of the Steam Deck game console is around 1280 x 800 pixels. So, the Steam Deck screen has about 1 million pixels. Because of this, even average graphics power is enough for it to perform well in games.
On the other hand, the new APU is likely to come in laptops with 1080p displays. And as you may know, a 1080p screen has two million pixels.
So, even though the AMD 780M is twice as fast as the Steam Deck, it essentially delivers Steam Deck-level performance on laptops.
However, this type of performance is by no means foul. So, overall, AMD will provide a half-decent gaming performance with the new APU.