17W AMD Radeon 890M iGPU on Strix APUs Convincingly Outperforms 28W+ Arc iGPU On Meteor Lake In Gaming Tests

AMD's Radeon 890M iGPU on Strix APUs has showcased strong gaming performance against Intel's Arc iGPU on Meteor Lake chips.

AMD's Radeon 800M iGPUs have showcased some strong performance for integrated graphics. We recently covered how the chips were much faster than the Intel Arc and older RDNA 3-based iGPUs and new gaming tests have been published by TechEpiphany, comparing the 17W Strix APUs with a 28W+ Meteor Lake CPU.

For tests, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 flagship was used which features the full 16 compute unit "RDNA 3.5" configuration with a clock speed of up to 2900 MHz. This chip was tested on an ASUS Vivobook S 16 OLED which features 32 GB of LPDDR5X-7500 memory and tuned down to 17W as the chip runs at up to 60W by default. For comparison, an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H was used and it features the same 8 Xe-cores as the flagship 185H albeit at a lower 2.25 GHz clock (100 MHz lower than Core Ultra 9 185H). The chip was configured with 32 GB of LPDDR5X-6400 memory.

Starting with the performance tests, the AMD Radeon 890M iGPU at 17W delivered 50-70 FPS in Tomb Raider (2013) which marks a 40-60% gain over the Arc Xe-LPG iGPU running at 28W. Next, Resident Evil 6's in-game benchmark was used in which the chip delivered over 60 FPS and even managed to output over 100 FPS, marking a 20-30% gain over the Intel Arc Xe-LPG iGPU. Both games were tested at 1080p and maxed out visual fidelity.

In Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice (1080p / High), the AMD Radeon 890M iGPU gave close to a 20-25% performance uplift over the Arc Xe-LPG iGPU but had stuttering which could be resolved through a future driver update. In Cyberpunk 2077 (1080P / Low), the game was running around 35-50 FPS, offering a 40-50% lead over the Meteor Lake iGPU, and was also much smoother than the Xe-LPG iGPU.

Lastly, we have God of War which was tested at 1080p using the PS4 preset. Here, we are looking at performance around 40 FPS which puts the chip 30-40% faster than the Intel Xe-LPG iGPU. What's more interesting is that the Radeon 890M "RDNA 3.5" iGPU sometimes drops to 16W and through-out the tests, the chip was running at clock speeds ranging from 1.0 GHz to 1.5 GHz while the Intel Xe-LPG iGPU was running around 1.6 to its maximum clock of 2.25 GHz.

At 16-17W, these results look superb for AMD's Radeon 890M iGPUs and the RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture in general. Upcoming handhelds that may end up featuring these chips should see strong performance and efficiency uplifts, leading to higher battery times along with great gaming capabilities even when running at lower power limits.

The only thing that remains to be seen is if Intel's upcoming "Xe2" architecture will offer a convincing fight against RDNA 3.5 iGPUs. Xe2 aims to offer up to 50% performance uplift and a vastly improved architecture backed by robust driver support. Some games tested here are old and we've seen Intel's Arc iGPUs and discrete GPUs struggle with them but the driver team is working hard to optimize older APIs and lay the groundwork for Xe2.