AMD Radeon R7 (Bristol Ridge) vs AMD Radeon HD 7310

AMD Radeon R7 (Bristol Ridge)

The AMD Radeon R7 (Bristol Ridge) is an integrated graphics card for the fastest mobile AMD Carrizo APUs. At its launch, the R7 is available on the top model FX9830P with 512 GCN shader units and a core clock of 900 MHz. The technical specifications do not differ from the AMD Radeon R7 in Carrizo, but the clock is up to 100 MHz higher. Depending on the cooling and the configurable TDP (12-45 Watts), the performance can differ quite a lot. The performance also depends on the memory (best performance with dual-channel DDR4).

Architecture and Features

According to AMD, the Radeon R7 consists of eight cores based on the third GCN generation (often called GCN 1.2 or 2.0 in the press). It is therefore very similar to the Tonga desktop chip and supports DirectX 12 (FL 12_0). Furthermore, its shaders can be used with Mantle, OpenGL and OpenCL. HSA 1.0 is supported for running code on both CPU and GPU cores simultaneously.

Compared to the Kaveri generation (Kaveri R7 with GCN 1.1), the new color compression in particular results in better memory utilization and improves the gaming performance by 5-7 %. 

The improved video decoder of Carrizo/Bristol Ridge now includes UVD 6 (Unified Video Decoder), which can decode HVEC / H.265 up to 4K in hardware. Furthermore, the VCE (Video Codec Engine) has been improved for faster transcoding of H.264. More information on architecture and features of the Bristol Ridge architecture can be found in our launch article.

Performance

Depending on the configurable TDP of the Bristol Ridge chips between 12 up to 45 Watts, there can be significant differences in games. Overall, the results are slightly better compared to the Carrizo Radeon R7 due to the higher clocks for comparable model. You can still use the Kaveri R7 benchmarks to check the gaming performance.

Power Consumption

Depending on the configurable TDP (cTDP), the 28 nm chip is specified at 12-45 Watts. It can therefore be used for thin and light notebooks as well as medium-sized devices or All-in-Ones (AiO).

AMD Radeon HD 7310

The AMD Radeon HD 7310 (or perhaps also called ATI Mobility Radeon HD 7310) is an integrated graphics card in the 2nd generation Zacate netbook processor. It is based on the same graphics core as the Radeon HD 6310, the clock speed is identical as well. Furthermore, it features the UVD3 video processor.

The 3D performance of the HD 7310 is beneath a HD 4330 due to the missing dedicated graphics memory (shared memory only). Gaming performance is therefore similar to a Nvidia ION or Intel HD Graphics graphics card. In our tests, the almost identical 6310 was only able to run low end games like Fifa 11, Sims 3 and Star Craft 2 single player in lowest detail settings fluently. More demanding games like Risen or Call of Duty series were not playable. Detailed performance information can be found here.

The UVD3 video decoder allows the decoding of HD videos using the graphics card. It allows the parallel decoding of two MPEG2, H.264 and VC-1 streams and therefore compatible to BD-Live. Furthermore, the new UVD3 also supports DivX, Xvid and MPEG4 Part 2 decoding. Blu-Ray 3D via MCV (Multiview Video Coding) is theoretically supported by the UVD3 but wasn't available in the first laptops and platforms (no hardware accelleration and no HDMI 1.4 output).