AMD Radeon HD 8970M Benchmarked

The MSI GX70 notebook is fitted out with the Radeon HD 8970M GPU, which was recently put to the test by NotebookSpec and while they didn’t run comparisons with Nvidia hardware it does still give us a good impression of the hardware.

The performance of the HD 8970M and the AMD A10-5750M APU offers up performance around 30% above that of the GTX 680 in terms of graphics performance, but it looses out big time with it’s overall score. This is mostly down to the CPU / GPU combination and we expect this performance to be about on par with the GTX 780M.

The performance preset tests however tell a different story and this is again most likely to the choice of CPU handing the tests differently, effectively bottle necking  (or not as the case may be) the GPU’s performance, something that would benefit from an Intel / AMD side by side comparison.

3DMark11 Comparison (CPU / Overall Score)

AMD Radeon HD 8970M A10-5750M P5422 / 100%
AMD Radeon HD 7970M A10-4600M P4759 / 87%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M i7-4700MQ P7593 / 140%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M ? P6143 / 113%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675M i7-3630QM P4391 / 80%

AMD Radeon HD 8970M is powered by Neptune XT GPU, which is suspected to be the same as the HD7970M, with 1280 stream processors, 32 ROPs, 2GB memory, a 256 bit interface, it could just be that the clocks have been pushed up, as seems to be the case with the new Nvidia mobile GPUs.

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