AMD Radeon Pro 460 vs AMD Radeon Pro 450 vs AMD Radeon RX 480 (Laptop)

AMD Radeon Pro 460

The AMD Radeon Pro 460 is mobile graphics card for laptops that can be ordered as an option for the Apple MacBook Pro 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 460 offers all 1024 shaders of the Polaris 11 chip but most likely at a reduced clock speed. AMD states a peak performance of 1.86 TFLOPS, compared to the 2.2 of the RX 460 (desktop). Apple presented the Pro 460 as 130 % faster than the previous Radeon R9 M370X in the 2015 MacBook Pro 15 regarding graphics performance.

The performance should be therefore a bit slower than the Radeon RX 460, which is similar to the GTX 965M. It is the only card in the MacBook Pro 15 line-up that features more than 2 GB VRAM (Radeon Pro 450 and 455). 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 460 are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here. Therefore, the Pro 460 should support DisplayPort 1.2 (although Polaris supports up to 1.4 ready) and HDMI 2.0 (via USB-C adapter) as well as H.265 video de- and encoding (support in macOS questionable).

The power consumption of the Pro 460 is rated at a TDP of 35 Watt (according to the AMD blog post).

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 480 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 480 (formerly known as R9 M480 or RX 480M) is a mobile high end graphics cards. It is based on the new Polaris architecture (Polaris 10 chip) and manufactured in 14nm FinFET. It should be based on the same chip as the desktop RX 480 (see for benchmarks and specs) but maybe offer lower clock speeds. The card was never used in a laptop (up to now) and succeeded by the slightly improved Radeon RX 580.