AMD has announced the first RDNA 3 GPUs for gaming laptops, and surprisingly, it’s the more entry-level GPUs of the generation that are out of the gate first.
The Radeon RX 7600M XT is the top chip announced at CES 2023. This fairly mid-range offering should have what it takes to compete with, if not outperform, Nvidia’s mobile RTX 3060 6GB (which has more cores than the desktop RTX 3060). In a graph shown on stage during CEO Dr. Lisa Su’s speech (opens in new tab)which admittedly lacked actual frame rate numbers, AMD boasted a 22% to 31% gain over Nvidia’s last-gen mobile GPU.
To achieve that kind of performance, the RX 7600M XT comes with 32 RDNA 3 Compute Units (CUs). That’s 2,048 stream processors, and probably means we’re looking at the Navi 33 GPU in full here. This GPU runs at a game clock of 2,300 MHz, which is the same as reported with the desktop RX7900XTX (opens in new tab), and it will consume about 120W of power. That’s not too unusual for a laptop chip, as it has the same power consumption as the last generation RX 6650M XT.
The RX 7600M XT offers 42.8 TFLOPs of half-precision computational performance, which is quite a big step up from the 19.94 TFLOPs available with the RX 6650M XT. That’s the RDNA 3 architecture working its magic: AMD’s latest desktop GPUs also offer a fairly significant boost in computational performance.
Though game performance is more than just TFLOPs. Memory bandwidth helps a lot, and the RX 7600M XT is paired with 8GB of GDDR6 memory over a 128-bit bus. With a speed of 18 Gbps, this provides a bandwidth of up to 288 GB/s – slightly more than the 256 GB/s of the RX 6650M XT thanks to the faster memory clock.
| Header Cell – Column 0 | Calculate units | Stream processors | Game frequency | Infinite Cache | Memory | GPU power |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT | 32 | 2,048 | 2,300MHz | 32MB | 8GB GDDR6 | 120W |
| AMD Radeon RX 7600M | 28 | 1,792 | 2,070MHz | 32MB | 8GB GDDR6 | 90W |
| AMD Radeon RX 7700S | 32 | 2,048 | 2,200MHz | 32MB | 8GB GDDR6 | 100W |
| AMD Radeon RX 7600S | 28 | 1,792 | 1,865MHz | 32MB | 8GB GDDR6 | 75W |
AMD’s large built-in cache, known as Infinity Cache, helps with the bandwidth demands of modern gaming, and you’ll find 32MB of the stuff on the RX 7600M XT. That seems like a fair amount for what will likely be a GPU paired with high-refresh 1080p and 1440p panels.
Also announced today is the AMD Radeon RX 7600M, which is slightly slower than the XT and comes with four fewer CUs (compute units).
Then there are the RX 7000S series GPUs, which include the RX 7700S and RX 7600S. Despite the minor name change, these are quite close in spec to the RX 7600M XT and RX 7600M, but they are more energy-efficient designs and therefore run a bit slower.
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All of the above GPUs are built using the RDNA 3 architecture and as such access the benefits it offers, such as the Radiance Display Engine, AI and ray tracing capabilities, and support for AV1 encoding.
Several OEMs are working on AMD Advantage Edition laptops with AMD’s new 7000-series GPUs in the first half of 2023, so stay tuned. That includes Alienware’s M18 and M16 laptops, Asus’ TUG Gaming A16, Emdoor’s APX970 and AG958P, and IP3’s ARN37A.
Though it’s worth noting that Nvidia has announced that too The RTX 40 series goes to gaming laptops (opens in new tab) at CES 2023. A full stack of Ada Lovelace-powered graphics cards is coming, from the RTX 4050 to the RTX 4090. The high-end chips will be available starting February 8, while the mid-range and entry-level GPUs will arrive later on February 22 February on.