Qualcomm Adreno 618 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega Mobile vs AMD Radeon RX Vega M GL / 870

Qualcomm Adreno 618

The Qualcomm Adreno 618 is a mobile graphics card for upper mid-range smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It is included in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 and 730G SoCs and based on the Adreno 600 architecture (like the Adreno 630, which should be fully compatible in software).

In our benchmarks, the Adreno 618 in the Snapdragon 730 was 14 to 30% faster than the Adreno 616 in the Snapdragon 710. The performance in the 730G should be additional 15% faster, due to higher clock rates.

The GPU supports modern standards like Vulkan 1.0 (according to Wikipedia), OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0 and DirectX 11 (FL 11_1).

AMD Radeon RX Vega Mobile

The AMD Radeon Vega Mobile is a dedicated graphics card for laptops. It most likely uses the same chip as the Kaby-Lake-G graphics part. Rumors currently speak of 28 CUs (= 1792 shaders) instead of the 24 CUs in the Kaby-Lake-G top model. The clock speed should be also around 1 GHz. As graphics memory, the GPU most likely also uses 4 GB HMB2.

The Vega architecture offers some improvements over the Polaris generation and now supports DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1. More information is available in our dedicated article about the Raven Ridge architecture.

The power consumption should be similar to the Kaby-Lake-G chips (altough this may be more efficient due to power sharing and distribution). The Kaby-Lake-G is rated at 100 Watt including a 35-45 Watt processor.

The Radeon Vega Mobile was announced one day before CES at a press event by Lisa Su. 

AMD Radeon RX Vega M GL / 870

The AMD Radeon RX Vega M GL or Radeon RX Vega 870 (according to Dell) is an integrated GPU in the slower Intel Kaby-Lake-G SoC. It combines a Kaby-Lake processor, a Vega graphics card and 4 GB HBM2 memory on a single package. The graphics card offers 20 CUs (1280 shaders) and is clocked from 931 - 1011 MHz.

Currently it looks like the GPU is a mixture of Polaris (Shaders?) and Vega (HBM memory controller at least). E.g. the graphics card is called Polaris 22 internally. Detailed information on the Vega architecture can be found in our dedicated article about the Raven Ridge architecture.

The performance of the Vega M GL should be between the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti according to benchmarks from Intel. Therefore, it should be well suited for 1080p and high resolution gaming.

The power consumption should be quite similar to a dedicated Vega Mobile GPU, but due to the small form factor, smaller laptops can be built with the Kaby-Lake-G SoC. The TDP is specified at 65 Watt for the whole package including GPU, CPU and HBM2 memory.