AMD Radeon HD 8970M Laptop

By Jeff Belmont

Manufacturer	AMD
Redeon HD 8900M Series	Redeon HD 8970M Crossfire: 2560 @ 850 - 900MHz 256 Bit @ 1200MHz Redeon HD 8970M: 1280 @ 850 - 900MHz 256 Bit @ 1200MHz
Codename	Neptune
Architecture	GCN
Pinelines	1280 - unified
Core Speed*	850 - 900 MHz
Shader Speed*	850 - 900 MHz
Memory Speed	1200 MHz
Memory Bus Width	256 Bit
Memory Type	GDDR5
Max. Amount of Memory	2048 MB
Shared Memory	No
DirectX	DirectX 11.1, Shader 5.0
Power Consumption	100 Watt
Transistors	2800 Million
Technology	28 nm
Features	2304 GLOPS SP, 144 DP Compute Power, 154 GB/s Memory Bandwidth, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, 20 Compute Units (OpenCL 1.2), 212 nm2 Die Size PCIe 3.0 x 16
notebook size	Large
Date of announcement	15.05.2013

* The specified clock rates are only guidelines for the manufacturer and can be altered by them.

While the specifications above are not far beyond nor behind what NVidia's 780M touts, AMD has always offered their counterparts at a noticeably lower premium - attracting a good many budget gamers, while still garnering respect. And the gaming industry is not the only one privy to AMD's dedicated graphics chips; photo and video editing enthusiasts will welcome the new potential the card offers as well (although it's worth noting that the 8970M is the same architecture as its 7970M predecessor).

It has also been reported that applications that utilize OpenCL function much better with a AMD cards.

While the benchmarks/FPS scores in many modern games is unimpressive when equipped with the A10 APU (mobiles), scores with an i7 have shown good frame rates in most games. The only area users may shy away from is systems equipped with Enduro. Although it has come a long way since its inception, some users are all too familiar "enduring Enduro". Thankfully, not every laptop incorporates switchable graphics (such as Asus gaming laptops), so there are alternatives to paying more for NVidia cards - unless, of course, you want to.