NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs AMD Radeon R5 M330 vs AMD Radeon R5 M320

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 128 Bit memory bus. It offers 2,560 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2060 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3050 is specified at 130 Watt and therefore better than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

AMD Radeon R5 M330

The AMD Radeon R5 M330 is a low-end dedicated graphics card for laptops.  The core clock is pretty high with up to 1030 MHz, however, the bottleneck is the 64-bit DDR3 graphics memory (clocked at 1000 MHz, 2000 MHz effective).

Performance

Due to the higher core speed, the performance of the Radeon R5-M330 should be slightly above the AMD Radeon R5 M255 (see for gaming benchmarks). Therefore, very demanding games of 2014 and 2015 like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Assassin's Creed Unity may not be playable smoothly. For older or less demanding games the performance should be sufficient for low to medium detail settings. Detailed benchmarks will be listed below as soon as we get a sample with the Radeon M330 in house.

The 320 shaders can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 5 compute units).

Features

Features of the R5 M330 include video decoding for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Flash directly by the AMD GPU. Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos are compatible as well.

The R5 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 M330 can directly support multiple monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.

Other features include ZeroCore for a reduced power consumption when the display is turned off and Power Gating to power down areas of the chip that are not used. 

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 allows audio output simultaneously and in parallel to multiple devices with the new Discrete Digital Multipoint Audio (DDMA) feature.

Power consumption

The power consumption should be similar to R7 M255 or even a bit below and therefore suited for 13-inch laptops and larger.

AMD Radeon R5 M320

The AMD Radeon R5 M320, codenamed Meso LE (DDR3), is a dedicated entry level graphics card for laptops. It is unclear if it is based on a new chip (GCN 2.0/1.2) or an older one. Our informations indicate that it is a new chip supporting FreeSync and DirectX 12. The GPU is produced in 28nm at TSMC and offers 320 unified shaders (5 compute units). The clock speed can hit a maximum of 855 MHz.

Thanks to the lower clock, the Radeon R5 M320 is sitting below the M330 and is on par with integrated solutions like the Intel HD Graphics 620 or AMD's Radeon R7 (Bristol Ridge) in benchmarks as well as gaming tests. Demanding titles are too challenging for the GPU, and even older titles like Bioshock Infinite or Tomb Raider are limited to low details.