The first benchmark purporting to reveal the graphics performance of AMD's latest laptop APUs has appeared. Codenamed "Phoenix" and branded "Ryzen 7040" series (opens in new tab), the chip's 780M graphics core uses RDNA graphics technology, about 25% faster than the Ryzen 6000 APU's older 680M graphics, about twice as fast performance than the AMD graphics in the Steam Deck.

Specifically, these figures are from the older 3DMark Time Spy. According to a poster on the Chinese forum Bilibili (via Tom's Hardware (opens in new tab)), the 780M GPU hits about 3,000 points. This compares to about 2,400 points for the older 680M and about 1,700 points for the Steam Deck (opens in new tab).

To put these numbers further into context, the Nvidia GTX 1060 on desktops puts up about 4,200 points, while the RTX 2050 on laptops puts up 3,200 points. The RTX 3060, on the other hand, scores about 9,000 points, while the RTX 4080 (open in new tab) scores 14,835 points.

In many ways, the most interesting comparison is the APU in the Steam deck. It too is made by AMD and is much less powerful than the new Phoenix chip and its Radeon 780M.

The new APU has 768 RDNA 3-spec shader cores and 32 render outputs, with a boost clock of up to 2.9 GHz and a maximum processing performance of 8.9 TFLOPS. Steam Deck's GPU, on the other hand, has 512 RDNA 2-spec shader cores and 16 render outputs and is rated at 3.3 TFLOPS.

Slightly trickier is that the 780M's 8.9TFLOPS relies on RDNA 3's tricky double-pumped shader architecture. In practice, it does not always deliver double the performance. Therefore, it is better to see the 780M as having raw shader performance closer to 4.5TFLOPS, which is consistent with the leaked Time Spy results.

Of course, the Steam Deck has a fairly low-resolution 1280 x 800 pixel display, so the relatively modest graphics performance is sufficient for a good gaming experience. That is, it will have approximately 1 million pixels.

A 1080p display, on the other hand, has 2 million pixels. So if the new 780M graphics is really twice as fast as the Steam Deck, then it is an APU that is as well suited for 1080p screens as the Steam Deck's chip is for its own display. This is not so great.

All of this suggests that AMD's latest APUs may be able to provide a half-decent gaming experience. Still, you probably won't go out and buy a 780M-only laptop just for gaming. But if you do end up buying it, perhaps as a work machine, you won't complain if it turns out to be half-decent at gaming.