With powerful AMD APUs built around Vega, RDNA2 and now RDNA3 graphics, including the Radeon 780M GPU, compact portable devices are thriving in the gaming space.
ETA PRIME is a tech reviewer who tests everything that is limited by power. The YouTuber has shared plenty of reviews of handheld gaming PCs, Mini-PCs and laptops over the past few years.
The reviewer's latest test of an ASUS TUF laptop with the Ryzen 9 7940HS is one of the first of its kind. AMD has said very little about the HS variants of the Ryzen 7040 series, and only a few details are listed on its official website.
The AMD Phoenix APU is the company's newest processor, introduced at CES in January this year. The chip is built on the Zen4 architecture and paired with RDNA3 graphics. The GPU is what makes this APU interesting: it has the same number of cores as the previous-generation Rembrandt series, but with higher clock speeds and a newer architecture. Combined with fast DDR5 memory, that could change mobile gaming once again.
The machine ETA Prime tested is the ASUS TUF A15 with an RTX 4060 discrete graphics card, but his review has nothing to do with the RTX. It is devoted entirely to the integrated Radeon 780M GPU.
The Ryzen 9 7940HS is an 8-core Zen4 CPU with a 4.0 GHz base clock and a boost of up to 5.2 GHz. The system allows the TDP to be adjusted up to 80W. The ASUS gaming laptop is equipped with dual-channel DDR5-5600 memory and up to 4GB of shared memory dedicated to the GPU. That allocation can potentially be increased on other systems with more RAM.
The Radeon 780M GPU has a base clock of up to 2.8 GHz, and the 3.0 GHz clock is not available at stock settings.
In 3DMark, the Radeon 780M GPU is 12% and 15% faster than the 680M in Fire Strike and Time Spy, respectively. Notably, the 680M system is using faster LPDDR5 memory.
According to ETA Prime, the initial drivers for this machine are not ready for many games. The system crashed in titles such as Spider-Man 1 and 2, though it is worth noting that there is still no official driver for the Phoenix Radeon 780M.
AMD Radeon 780M (RDNA3) iGPU average gaming performance with the CPU limited to 80W:
- CSGO (1080p High): 130 FPS
- GTA (1080p Very High): 81 FPS
- Forza Horizon 5 (1080p High): 86 FPS
- Fortnite (1080p Medium): 78 FPS
- Doom Eternal (1080p Medium): 83 FPS
- Horizon Zero Dawn (1080p Favor Performance): 69 FPS
- Call of Duty Modern Warfare (1080p Recommended/FSR Perf.): 106 FPS
- Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p Medium/Low Mix): ~70 FPS
The Radeon 780M can deliver playable performance in popular games at 1080p. The system was tested with Performance mode set through the ASUS Armory Crate software. Handheld gaming devices will be limited to 15-35W depending on the settings.
Interestingly, the integrated Radeon 780M GPU can be overclocked. ETA Prime had no trouble pushing the graphics clock to 3 GHz, as shown while playing Cyberpunk 2077.
The Radeon 780M's clock can even reach 3.25 GHz, but it is not stable. Hopefully, there will be broader compatibility and better overclocking support with an official driver once AMD Phoenix is released.
Watch ETA Prime's full test here:
