AMD Radeon 520 vs NVIDIA GeForce 945M

AMD Radeon 520

The Radeon 520 is a dedicated entry-level graphics card for laptops that was released in 2017. AMD reveals that the chip features five compute units based on the GCN architecture and 2 GB GDDR5 64-bit graphics memory. The new chip is not based on the Polaris architecture from 2016, but the old one that was introduced with the Radeon R5 M230 in 2014 and later used in the M330 and M430 / M440 / M445.

Due to the higher clock speed of up to 1030 MHz, the Radeon 520 should be slightly faster than the old Radeon R7 M445 (920 MHz, 320 shader units, GDDR5). However, the performance should be comparable, which means that demanding games like Dishonored 2, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or XCOM 2 should not run smoothly. Less demanding games like Overwatch, Fifa 17 (with a fast CPU) or Farming Simulator 17, would run well, but using low to medium detail settings. For detailed game benchmarks, visit the pages of the previous linked card. If only DDR3 is used, the performance should be on par with the Radeon R7 M440 (1021 MHz, 320 shader units, DDR3).

NVIDIA GeForce 945M

The NVIDIA GeForce 945M is a mid-range, DirectX 12-compatible graphics card for laptops unveiled in March 2015. It is based on Nvidia's Maxwell architecture (GM107 chip) and manufactured in 28 nm. The 945M offers 512 shaders (compared to the 640 of the GTX 950M) clocked at 928 MHz. The dedicated DDR3 graphics memory is connected with a 128 Bit bus clocked at 1000 MHz (effective 2000, 32 GB/s). 

Architecture

Compared to Kepler, Maxwell has been optimized in several details to increase power efficiency. Smaller Streaming Multiprocessors (SMM) with only 128 ALUs (Kepler: 192) and an optimized scheduler should lead to better utilization of the shaders. Nvidia promises that a Maxwell SMM with 128 ALUs can offer 90 percent of the performance of a Kepler SMX with 192 ALUs. GM107 features 5 SMMs and thus 640 shader cores, 40 TMUs and 16 ROPs (128-bit interface).

Another optimization is the massively enlarged L2 cache (GM107: 2 MB). The increased size can handle some of the memory traffic to allow for a relatively narrow memory interface without significantly reducing the performance.

GM107 supports DirectX 12 with feature level 11_0 only.

Performance

The performance of the 945M is slightly worse than the GTX 950M but clearly faster than the 940M. The DDR3 variant of the GTX 950M is about 10 percent faster for example. Therefore, it is most suited for medium details of demanding games in 2015 (see below for benchmarks).

Features

GM107 integrates the sixth generation of the PureVideo HD video engine (VP6), offering a better decoding performance for H.264 and MPEG-2 videos. Of course, VP6 supports all features of previous generations (4K support, PIP, video encoding via NVENC API). Unfortunately, HDMI 2.0 is still not supported.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the GeForce 945M should be somewhere around 40 Watt. Therefore it is most suited for bigger laptops from 14-inch and up.