Earlier today AMD’s Jay Marsden presented early news of the company’s latest mobile GPU series called Radeon HD 800M. At the moment, there is only partial information and AMD is going to show more at CES 2013, but the company was willing to share some information today:
First of all, this new series of mobile GPUs will support the latest APIs, namely DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.3 and OpenCL 1.2 — that’s thanks to its use of AMD’s GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. Secondly, there are going to be at least four GPU models: Radeon HD 8500M, Radeon HD 8600M, Radeon HD 8700M and Radeon HD 8800M. Here’s an official table that provides a comparative view of the specifications:
As you can imagine, the line-up covers all sorts of pricing, thermal and thinness segments. Without going into benchmarks and all, you can estimate the relative performance for the series by counting the number of cores. Graphics tends to scale almost linearly, so it’s pretty simple. Obviously, other things like memory bandwidth and the nature of the shaders (pixel rendering code programs) will affect performance too, but within one family of GPUs, it’s a good rule of thumb.
You can expect ATI to promote DirectX 11.1 heavily while NVIDIA can’t “technically” claim “full support” (the wording is chosen carefully) for DX 11.1, although NVIDIA would probably point out that it supports DX 11_0. If you are really curious about the differences between DX 11_0 and 11_1 head to this page from Microsoft, but glancing at the specs, I don’t think that most gamers will care *that much* as developers will work around the missing features for the time being, but if you see a feature that your really need, then your decision may be easy.
In terms of performance, AMD is quite confident that it can add value to its customers, but as always we think that you should take all that information with a grain of salt (coming from any vendor), until you can see independent benchmarks. On paper, this looks really promising, and of course, we’re looking forward to see the complete systems that AMD will be integrated into. At the end of the day, the whole package is what you may end up buying. More will be revealed at CES (probably prototypes too) and AMD says that those GPUs will land in “Q2 2013″… stay tuned.
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