AMD Radeon HD 7470M

The AMD Radeon HD 7470M (sometimes also still called ATI Mobility Radeon HD 7470) is a laptop graphics card for entry level to middle class notebooks. It is based on the old 40nm Seymore-XT chip and therefore just a renamed version of the Radeon HD 6490M. According to rumors there can be DDR3 and GDDR5 versions with different clock speeds. In our tests we also found a model with DDR3 that clocked only with 667MHz (Asus X54HR) and is therefore slower than the 6490M.

The 160 Stream processors are still based on the "old" 5D architecture similar to the 5000 series. Therefore, the number of shaders is not comparable to the 1D cores of current Nvidia GPUs. The Stream processors can be used with DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL. With the later two the cores can also be used for general computations like transcoding videos.

The performance  of the higher clocked GDDR5 version is about on a level of the Mobility Radeon HD 550v / GeForce GT 325M. Therefore, the card is positioned in the low end and allows to play current games in low detail and resolution settings. In our tests with a similar Radeon HD 6490M in a 15" MBP, games like Starcraft 2 or Mafia 2 reached about 30fps in medium detail settings with a resolution of 1024x768. Less demanding and older games like Trackmania also ran in high details and resolution settings. However, Battlefield 3 may not run at all and demanding games like Dirt 3 will only be playable in low settings.

The new UVD3 video decoder supports the decoding of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, Flash and now also Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos on the graphics card.

Furthermore, the HD 7400M series integrates a HD audio controller to transmit HD Audio (TrueHD or DTS Master Audio) over HDMI and DisplayPort (e.g. for Blu-Ray videos).

The AMD HD3D Technology offers support for Blu-Ray 3D and 3D displays (integrated and external). However, the solution is not as mature as Nvidias 3D Vision.

Thanks to Eyefinity the graphics chip is able to theoretically drive up to 4 monitors simultaneously. However, this only works if the laptop features enough DisplayPort outputs.

The power consumption of the chip should be similar to the Mobility Radeon HD 5470 and therefore suited for 13" laptops and up.