AMD Radeon HD 8690M
The AMD Radeon HD 8690M (sometimes known as the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 8690) is a DirectX 11.1 graphics card for laptops. Just like the 8500M and 8700M series, it is based on the Mars chip (28nm GCN architecture) with 384 shader cores, 24 TMUs, and 8 ROPs. The core is clocked at 775 MHz (or up to 825 MHz with Boost) and can access GDDR5 VRAM (64 Bit, 1125 MHz).
The performance of the Radeon HD 8690M is similar to the GeForce GT 730M and GT 640M. Current and demanding games (as of 2013) like Far Cry 3 should run fluently in medium-low resolutions and detail settings.
The 384 shaders can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 6 compute units). Compared to old TeraScale 2 chips, the GCN-based Mars architecture offers improved performance in this framework.
Features of the 8690M include video decoding via UVD3 for decoding MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Flash directly from the AMD GPU. Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos are now compatible as well.
The 8600M series also supports automatic graphics switching between the integrated GPU and discrete GPU. Called Enduro, the technology supersedes AMD's Dynamic Switchable Graphics and is similar to Nvidia's Optimus. Furthermore, the 8690M can directly support up to 2 connected monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.
Other features of the 8600M series include ZeroCore for reducing power consumption when the display is turned off and Power Gating to power down areas of the chip that are not used. PowerTune allows automatic overclocking and underclocking of the graphics card as long as the GPU is within its TDP limit. For example, the chip may be underclocked when running FurMark and OCCT, but will overclock in certain games like Lost Planet, Crysis or Resident Evil 5.
The integrated HD audio processor is able to transmit HD Audio (TrueHD or DTS Master Audio) over HDMI and DisplayPort (e.g., for Blu-Ray videos). Additionally, it now allows audio to output simultaneously and in parallel to multiple devices with the new Discrete Digital Multipoint Audio (DDMA) feature.
The power consumption should be in range of the old HD 7670M. As a result, the 8690M is suited for 13-inch notebooks or larger.
| Manufacturer | AMD | |||||||||||||||
| Radeon HD 8600M Series |
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| Architecture | GCN | |||||||||||||||
| Pipelines | 384 - unified | |||||||||||||||
| Core Speed * | 775 MHz | |||||||||||||||
| Memory Speed * | 4500 MHz | |||||||||||||||
| Memory Bus Width | 64 Bit | |||||||||||||||
| Memory Type | GDDR5 | |||||||||||||||
| Max. Amount of Memory | 1024 MB | |||||||||||||||
| Shared Memory | no | |||||||||||||||
| DirectX | DirectX 11.1, Shader 5.0 | |||||||||||||||
| technology | 28 nm | |||||||||||||||
| Notebook Size | medium sized | |||||||||||||||
| Date of Announcement | 16.11.2012 |
Benchmarks
Cinebench R15Ref. Match 64Bit +
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card
