AMD Radeon Pro 560X vs AMD Radeon RX 480 (Laptop) vs AMD Radeon Pro 450

AMD Radeon Pro 560X

The AMD Radeon Pro 560X is a mobile graphics card based on the small Polaris 21 chip from AMD. It is an option for the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro 2018 and is very similar to the Radeon Pro 460. Compared to the Radeon Pro 560 from the 2017 MBP15, the 560X is slightly higher clocked. The Radeon Pro 555X from the entry level model offers less cores.

The mobile Radeon Pro 560X should support all features of the desktop RX 460/560 like DisplayPort 1.2 (Polaris actually supports up to 1.4), HDMI 2.0 (via USB-C adapter), new H.265 video de- and encoder as well as architectural improvements. More information about the Polaris architecture is available in our dedicated review.

The Polaris 21 chip is manufactured in a slightly improved 14nm FinFET process according to AMD. The power consumption of the Radeon Pro 460 is 35 Watts according to AMD, so this should also be the case for the Pro 560X.

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.

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.