AMD may be temporarily bowing out of the top-end desktop graphics card market, but it is about to introduce its mobile GPU flagship. After several years out of the mobility discrete GPU market and a largely unnoticed presence, Team Red is back with the big guns (its biggest yet): The Radeon RX 7900M.
The Radeon RX 7900M is set to launch with the Alienware m18 “AMD Advantage” Edition gaming laptop. Featuring the Navi 31 core and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, this will be the 1440p mobile GPU to beat, at least in rasterized games. A leaked Geekbench test allows us to draw a preliminary performance chart of the RDNA 3 mobile flagship.
The Radeon RX 7900M is based on a heavily cut-down Navi 31 die with just 4,609 shaders and a 256-bit bus. Meanwhile, the GeForce RTX 4090 mobile is a repurposed RTX 4080 desktop with 9,728 cores and a 256-bit bus. And yet, in the Vulkan Compute bench, the Radeon RX 7900M scores 171,430 points, roughly the same as the GeForce RTX 4090 mobile, which tends to score in the 170,xxx range.
As explained earlier, the performance of notebook CPUs and GPUs tends to vary significantly from OEM to OEM. Sometimes, the same GPU can perform like a higher-tier variant if provided with adequate cooling, and vice versa. You can expect that here as well. After all, a GeForce RTX 4080 does battle the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
AMD’s RDNA 3 family has been thoroughly panned for its poor power efficiency. Not only did it fail to meet its 3GHz clock target, it failed to do so even with a high power budget. If the Radeon RX 7900M can offer comparable performance to the RTX 4090 mobile, it’ll be a remarkable achievement for the Radeon mobile team.
