Qualcomm Adreno 740 vs AMD Radeon 680M

Qualcomm Adreno 740

The Qualcomm Adreno 740 is a smartphone and tablet GPU that is integrated within the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. The chip will be available starting early 2023 and will be used mainly in high-end Android devices. 

According to Qualcomm, the Adreno GPU offers a 25% improved performance compared to the Adreno 730 predecessor in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. First benchmarks show that the Adreno GPU can even beat the Apple A16 GPU (iPhone 14 Pro series) in synthetic benchmarks. Therefore, the Adreno 740 is the fastest graphics chip for smartphones in 2022.

The iGPU supports hardware accelerated ray tracing and a game post processing accelerator (for bloom, depth of field and motion blur). Another first, is the support for Vulkan 1.3.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is produced in the modern 4nm process at TSMC.

AMD Radeon 680M

The AMD Radeon 680M is an integrated GPU in the Ryzen 6000 series for laptops (Rembrandt, e.g. Ryzen 9 6980HX). The iGPU is based on the RDNA2 architecture and has 12 CUs (= 768 shaders) clocked at up to 2,400 MHz (depending on the CPU model). The 680M and 660M iGPUs are the first integrated graphics card with hardware raytracing support, although the performance is too slow to use it in current games.

Thanks to the new architecture, high core count and the increased maximum core clock, the Radeon 680M should be clearly faster then the old Radeon Vega 8 iGPUs. Therefore, the 680M should be the fastest integrated graphics card in early 2022. Compared to the dedicated Radeon 5300M (also RDNA), the 680M should still be significantly slower. According to AMD, the Radeon 680M (in the 6800U) is faster than a dedicated Nvidia GeForce MX450 and best suited for 1080p gaming and low details (for AAA games).

Thanks to the modern 6nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD), so the graphics card can also be used for slim and light notebooks (depending on the CPU model). The whole Ryzen 6000 chip can be configured down to 15W.