AMD has just announced its Radeon RX 7900M laptop PC. This new mobile GPU is currently the most powerful the company has ever launched… and aims to (finally) compete with Nvidia’s best GeForce RTX chips.
First announced at CES 2023, the Alienware m18 is the first model to offer the Radeon RX 7900M as an option // Source: Alienware
AMD finally has a truly powerful mobile graphics card to pair with its powerful Ryzen 9 7945HX… and that can compete with Nvidia’s best mobile RTX 4000s. While the Chameleon brand dominates the market for GPUs for laptops almost unchallenged, AMD is releasing its new Radeon RX 7900M. This long-awaited new high-end mobile chip, the most powerful AMD has ever brought to market, joins Lisa Su’s company’s still fairly limited GPU offering for laptops.
Until now, the brand only offered four references of the latest generation (based on the RDNA 3 architecture), all positioned in the entry-level and mid-range range: on the one hand, the RX 7600M XT and the RX 7600M. ; and the Radeon RX 7700S and RX 7600S (less powerful but more energy efficient) on the other hand.
AMD (finally) gives Nvidia an answer to high-end mobile GPUs
In detail, the AMD Radeon RX 7900M combines 72 computing units and 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, mounted on a 256-bit memory interface. Its GPU is clocked at 1,825 MHz base and can reach a boost of 2,090 MHz while relying on 64 MB of Infinity Cache. The whole thing is finally announced with a maximum TGP of 180W, which has considerable significance in the portable PC market. It will likely require an impressive dissipation system to keep the chip cool when configured with this thermal envelope. Although laptop manufacturers can of course still limit it a little to fit it on more compact machines.
Source: AMD
Incidentally, AMD reminds you that this new Radeon RX 7900M is also based on the latest generation RDNA 3 architecture. It naturally supports ray tracing and also has a dedicated AI engine that should develop more performance than the old RDNA 2 architecture, explains AMD. The company finally mentions support for the AV1 codec (in encoding/decoding) and initially presents it as a graphics card compatible with publishing all the latest AAA files in 1440p.
This also suggests that AMD would have a Radeon RX 7900M XT on hand for Ultra HD gaming on laptops. We’ll see in the coming months whether the company actually has plans to compete in this area (perhaps) with the powerful RTX 4090 Mobile.
In any case, the Radeon RX 7900M is now available, although initially in the USA and on the Alienware m18, the first laptop on the market to be equipped with it. Equipped with a Ryzen 9 7945HX processor, the device starts across the Atlantic at a price of $2,799.99.
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