AMD Radeon RX 7900M “RDNA 3” Beats The NVIDIA RTX 4090 Laptop GPU In Vulkan Benchmark

AMD's flagship Radeon RX 7900M "RDNA 3" laptop GPU has been benchmarked and it is faster than NVIDIA's RTX 4090 Laptop chip in Vulkan tests.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900M is the flagship gaming GPU for laptops from the Red team and it is also the first laptop GPU ever to make use of a chiplet design. The chip was exclusively announced for the Alienware m18 laptop last month but despite being available since last month, there have been little to no reviews of the new Radeon GPU. We did get a teaser from a YouTuber, GizmoSlipTech, but besides that, there hasn't been much. But now, we have the latest benchmarks leaked out in Geekbench's OpenCL and Vulkan tests which should have surprising results.

AMD Radeon RX 7900M "Navi 31" GPU Specifications

The AMD Radeon RX 7900M GPU is based on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture and features a total of 36 WGPs or 72 Compute Units which make up a total of 4608 cores. That's 20% more cores than the 7800 XT & 10% lower cores than the 7900 GRE. Clock speeds for the GPU peak out at 2090 MHz.

In terms of memory, the GPU is equipped with a total of four MCDs which will enable a 256-bit wide bus interface & 16 GB memory capacities. That will get AMD on par with NVIDIA's top RTX 40 offerings such as the RTX 4090 which max out at 16 GB memory too. As for the power numbers, the AMD Radeon RX 7900M will be configured at a TGP of 160W & can be pushed up to 200W with SmartShift technologies.

AMD Radeon RX 7900M "Navi 31" GPU Performance

Starting with the numbers, we first want to outline the configuration. The Alienware m18 laptop is configured with the Ryzen 9 7945HX CPU which is the highest you can get and its a really missed opportunity to not include the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D model since this high-end gaming laptop will be perfect with the boost that comes from 3D V-Cache CPUs. The CPU still operates well over 5 GHz & there's also 32 GB of DDR5-5200 memory.

Performance-wise, the AMD Radeon RX 7900M Laptop GPU scored 171,430 points which makes it faster than both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 & RTX 4080 laptop GPUs and almost on par with the RTX 4070 Ti Desktop graphics card. So that's essentially RTX 3090 Ti or RX 6950 XT performance in a laptop form factor. The GPU is 9% faster than the 4090 Laptop & 25% faster than the 4080 Laptop GPUs.

In the OpenCL benchmark, we see the exact opposite with the Radeon RX 7900M scoring 144,611 points which ends up being slower than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU by -11.5%. Here, the card ends up between the 7800 XT and the 6800 XT.

We should highlight the Vulkan performance more since that is a more popular API used in games than OpenCL. AMD having the lead there is definitely great to see and more in line with what the company has officially revealed in its own internal benchmarks. The AMD Radeon RX 7900M does feature a higher target TGP than the RTX 4080 but at the same time, laptops featuring the GPU are going to cost less as detailed here. Overall, the Radeon RX 7900M is a strong RDNA 3 Laptop GPU but we would have loved to see it in more laptop configurations and options too.

News Sources: Benchleaks #1, #2