AMD Radeon Pro 450 vs AMD Radeon RX 490M

AMD Radeon Pro 450

The AMD Radeon Pro 450 is mobile graphics card for laptops that can be found in the entry-level model of the Apple MacBook Pro Retina 15 Late 2016. It is based on the small Polaris 11 chip which is manufactured in 14 nm FinFET at Globalfoundries. Compared to the similar Radeon RX 460 (see for benchmarks), the Pro 450 features only 640 shaders (compared to the 896) and achieves a peak performance of 1 TFLOPS (versus the 2.2 of the RX 460). The Pro 455 is 30% faster with 1.3 TFLOPS and the Pro 460 86% faster (peak performance).

The graphics performance in our first tests (e.g. 3DMark 11) is slightly above a GeForce GTX 950M. A major drawback is the small VRAM size of only 2 GB GDDR5. Furthermore, Apple and AMD don't provide driver updates for Windows using Bootcamp. The only option is to use modified drivers from BootcampDrivers.com.

The features of the Radeon Pro 450 are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here. According to AMD the Pro 450 supports DisplayPort 1.2 (although the Polaris chips should support 1.4) and HDMI 2.0 via USB-C adapter.

The power envelope of the faster Radeon Pro 460 is rated at 35 Watt according to the AMD blog post. Due to the slower specs, the Radeon Pro 450 should use slightly less.

AMD Radeon RX 490M

The AMD Radeon RX 490M (formerly known as R9 M490) is a mobile high end graphics cards. It should be based on the new Polaris architecture and manufactured in 14nm FinFET. Up to now it only surfaced in a driver (according to Videocardz.com) and should be announced in mid 2016. The efficiency of Polaris should be greatly improved and therefore the M490 should at least be able to perform like a GeForce GTX 980M.