AMD Radeon HD 7430M vs Intel HD Graphics P530 vs AMD Radeon HD 7490M

AMD Radeon HD 7430M

Intel HD Graphics P530

The Intel HD Graphics P530 (GT2) is an integrated graphics unit, which can be found in various Xeon workstation processors of the Skylake generation. The "GT2" version of the Skylake GPU offers 24 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at up to 1050 MHz (depending on the CPU model). Due to its lack of dedicated graphics memory or eDRAM cache, the P530 has to access the main memory (2x 64bit DDR3L-1600 / DDR4-2133).

Performance

Depending on the memory configuration, the HD Graphics P530 is just slightly behind a dedicated GeForce 920M and will handle modern games (as of 2015) in low or medium settings.

Features

The revised video engine now decodes H.265/HEVC completely in hardware and thereby much more efficiently than before. Displays can be connected via DP 1.2 / eDP 1.3 (max. 3840 x 2160 @ 60 Hz), whereas HDMI is limited to the older version 1.4a (max. 3840 x 2160 @ 30 Hz). However, HDMI 2.0 can be added using a DisplayPort converter. Up to three displays can be controlled simultaneously.

Power Consumption

The HD Graphics P530 can be found in mobile quad-core Xeon processors with 45 W TDP.

AMD Radeon HD 7490M

The AMD Radeon HD 7490M (sometimes also still called ATI Mobility Radeon HD 7490) is a laptop graphics card for entry-level to middle-class notebooks. It is based on the old 40nm Seymore-XT chip and is therefore just a renamed version of the Radeon HD 6490M. Depending on the notebook, the card can be clocked at 800 MHz for the core and 950 MHz for the GDDR5 memory.

The 160 Stream processors are still based on the "old" 5D architecture similar to the 5000 series. Therefore, the number of shaders is not directly comparable to the 1D cores of current Nvidia GPUs. The Stream processors can be used with DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL. The latter two APIs allow the Stream processors to be used for more general computational work, such as video transcoding.

The performance of the 7490M should be above the Nvidia GeForce GT 520M. Therefore, the card is positioned in the lower middle class and allows current games to play in medium detail and resolution settings. In our tests with a similar Radeon HD 6490M in a 15" MBP, modern games like Starcraft 2 and Mafia 2 reached about 30fps in medium detail settings under a resolution of 1024x768. Less demanding and older games like Trackmania also ran in high details and resolution settings. However, Battlefield 3 may not run at all and demanding games like Dirt 3 will only be playable in low settings.

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 7400M series integrates an 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 (both integrated and external). However, the solution is not as mature as Nvidias 3D Vision.

Thanks to Eyefinity, the AMD 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 Radeon HD 6490M and is therefore suited for 13" or larger laptops.