The RX 7900M is shaping up to be a small bombshell in the laptop sector. Already, initial feedback on Time Spy showed the chip to be faster than the RTX 4080 Mobile. Now, back on GeekBench 6, the card is faster than the RTX 4090 Mobile.
RX 7900M, faster than an RTX 4090M?
As a reminder, with this 7900M, AMD is putting its Navi 31 GPU into a laptop. The chip in question features a total of 72 compute units for a total of 4608 stream processors. This is 20% more than the RX 7800 XT (3840 stream processors). In terms of frequency, the GPU is rated at 1825 MHz with a boost to 2090 MHz. Finally, this chip will be equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, all on a 256-bit bus. Memory bandwidth will therefore be 576 GB/s.
Theoretical FP32 performance is virtually on a par with the 4090M, with 38.5 TFLOP compared with 39.7 TFLOP for NVIDIA’s card. Against the 4080M, we’re better off: 33.8 TFLOP.
In any case, laptops equipped with both AMD and NVIDIA cards were put through their paces on the test bench. For the AMD card, we find scores of 171,430 pts with the VulkanAPI, while the score falls to 144,611 pts on OpenCL. Compared with the 4090M, the score is 9% higher with Vulkan, but lags well behind with OpenCL (25%).
Clearly, a frequency problem may explain such a low score. During the test, the card was running at 1736 MHz. But this may also be due to the driver: more optimized for Vulkan than for OpenCL!
