NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 vs AMD Radeon HD 6490M

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is high-end desktop graphics card based on the Ampere generation. It uses the big GA102 chip and offers 8,704 shaders and 10 GB GDDR6X graphics memory.

The gaming performance in 4k is clearly better than the old GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (approximately 15% faster). Therefore, even demanding games should run with maximum detail settings in 4k. Enabling raytracing will however reduce the framerate and therefore maximum details won't be playable. 

The RTX3080 is produced in 8nm at Samsung and rated at 320 Watt but the power efficiency is still quite good.

AMD Radeon HD 6490M

The AMD Radeon HD 6490M (sometimes also still called ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6490) is a laptop graphics card for entry level to middle class notebooks. It is based on the Seymore-XT chip and therefore features the UVD 3 video decoder. Compared to the slower HD 6470M, the 6490M offers optional fast GDDR5 graphics memory. The GDDR5 versions are clocked with 700 ord 750MHz, the DDR3 version features a higher 800MHz core clock, but should be slower due to the slower graphics memory.

The 120 Stream processors should be 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 Tessellation performance should be improved (like the desktop 6800 series) with the new cards. 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 lower middle class and allows to play current games in medium detail and resolution settings. In our tests with a 15" MBP modern 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. Detailed benchmark results can be seen at the bottom of this page.

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 6400M 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.