AMD Radeon R5 M315 vs AMD Radeon R5 M330

AMD Radeon R5 M315

The AMD Radeon R5 M315, codenamed Meso LE (DDR3), is a dedicated entry level graphics card for laptops. It is unclear if it is based on a new chip (GCN 2.0/1.2) or an older one. The GPU is produced in 28nm at TSMC and offers 320 unified shaders (5 compute units). The clock speed should be below the 855 MHz of the faster R5 M320 that also features 5 compute units. The gaming performance is located in the entry level, making the M315 suited only for light gaming.

AMD Radeon R5 M330

The AMD Radeon R5 M330 is a low-end dedicated graphics card for laptops.  The core clock is pretty high with up to 1030 MHz, however, the bottleneck is the 64-bit DDR3 graphics memory (clocked at 1000 MHz, 2000 MHz effective).

Performance

Due to the higher core speed, the performance of the Radeon R5-M330 should be slightly above the AMD Radeon R5 M255 (see for gaming benchmarks). Therefore, very demanding games of 2014 and 2015 like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Assassin's Creed Unity may not be playable smoothly. For older or less demanding games the performance should be sufficient for low to medium detail settings. Detailed benchmarks will be listed below as soon as we get a sample with the Radeon M330 in house.

The 320 shaders can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 5 compute units).

Features

Features of the R5 M330 include video decoding for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Flash directly by the AMD GPU. Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos are compatible as well.

The R5 series also supports automatic graphics switching between the integrated GPU and discrete GPU. Called Enduro, the technology supersedes AMD's Dynamic Switchable Graphics and is similar to Nvidia's Optimus. Furthermore, the M330 can directly support multiple monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.

Other features include ZeroCore for a reduced power consumption when the display is turned off and Power Gating to power down areas of the chip that are not used. 

The integrated HD audio processor is able to transmit HD Audio (TrueHD or DTS Master Audio) over HDMI and DisplayPort (e.g., for Blu-Ray videos). Additionally, it allows audio output simultaneously and in parallel to multiple devices with the new Discrete Digital Multipoint Audio (DDMA) feature.

Power consumption

The power consumption should be similar to R7 M255 or even a bit below and therefore suited for 13-inch laptops and larger.