AMD Radeon HD 8610G vs AMD Radeon R6 (Mullins) vs AMD Radeon R4 (Beema)

AMD Radeon HD 8610G

The AMD Radeon HD 8610G is a processor graphics card in some of the low voltage AMD Richland APUs (A10-5745M). It offers the full amount of 384 shader cores (VLIW4 architecture) and clocks at 533 - 626 MHz. The 8610G has no dedicated graphics memory, but shares the main memory with the CPU cores.

The integrated video decoder (UVD3) allows the full decoding of Multi-View Codec (MVC), MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, xVid), MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and Adobe Flash HD videos.

According to the clock rates, the performance should be similar to the Radeon HD 7660G or the Intel HD Graphics 4600. Thus, the Radeon HD 8610G is as fast as a dedicated HD 6650M or NVIDIA GeForce GT 620M. Without fast dual-channel memory the performance drops dramatically, however. The shaders of the chip can also be used for general computing.

The APU is manufactured in 32nm and rated at a TDP of 25 watts. This allows the chip to be used in notebooks from 12 to 13 inches or bigger.

AMD Radeon R6 (Mullins)

The AMD Radeon R6 is an integrated DirectX 12 graphics card found in some AMD APUs (for example, the A10 Micro-6700T). It offers 128 shader cores across two Compute Units and is based on the GCN architecture. Core clock is rated at up to 500 MHz. The GPU does not have dedicated VRAM and will access main system memory (single-channel DDR3L-1333).

Using its UVD (Unified Video Decoder), the GPU can support the CPU when decoding videos up to 4K. The chip also integrates a specialized video encoder called VCE. Video streams can output via VGA, DVI, HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2 to up to two external monitors.

The performance of the Radeon R6 is roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 8280, as the GPU Boost is limited by the very low TDP. Typically, only older or very undemanding games will play fluently.

AMD Radeon R4 (Beema)

The AMD Radeon R4 is an integrated DirectX 12 graphics card found in some AMD APUs (for example, the A6-6310). It offers 128 shader cores across two Compute Units and based on the GCN architecture. Clock speeds can be up to 800 MHz. The graphics card does not have dedicated VRAM and will access main system memory (single-channel DDR3L-1866).

Using its UVD (Unified Video Decoder), the GPU can support the CPU when decoding videos up to 4K. In addition, the chip integrates a specialized video encoder called VCE. Video streams can output via VGA, DVI, HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2 to up to two external monitors.

The performance of the Radeon R4 is roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 7470M or the Intel HD Graphics 4200. Typically, only older or less demanding games like FIFA will play fluently.