AMD Radeon R7 M370 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti

AMD Radeon R7 M370

The AMD Radeon R7 M370 is a lower mid-range graphics card for laptops that was announced mid 2015. It is based on the 28nm Mars chip that uses the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. Therefore, it is similar to the older Radeon R9 M260X but slightly lower clocked.

Performance

Thanks to its relatively high memory bandwidth, the performance of the Radeon R7 M370 is similar to the Nvidia GeForce 830M. Current and demanding games of 2015 will run fluently only low or medium resolutions and detail settings. In older games, however, higher quality settings will be possible.

The 384 shaders can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 6 compute units). Compared to old TeraScale 2 chips, the GCN-based Mars architecture offers improved performance in this framework.

Features

Features of the R7 M370 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 R7 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 M265 can directly support multiple monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.

Other features include ZeroCore for reducing power consumption when the display is turned off and Power Gating to power down areas of the chip that are not used. PowerTune allows automatic overclocking and underclocking of the graphics card as long as the GPU is within its TDP limit. For example, the chip may be underclocked when running FurMark and OCCT, but will overclock in certain games like Lost Planet, Crysis or Resident Evil 5.

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 the old Radeon HD 8670M and slightly above the Maxwell-based Nvidia GeForce 830M. As a result, the R7 M370 is best suited for 13-inch notebooks or larger.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti is a mid-range desktop graphics card that was announced early 2014. It is based on the first generation of the Maxwell architecture, namely the GM107 chip. Maxwell sets its focus on energy efficiency and was able to outperform the predecessor Kepler and AMD chips in similar performance regions. The GTX 750 Ti supports DirectX 11.2 but only feature level 11_0.

The GeForce GTX 750 Ti is comparable to the Nvidia Geforce GTX 860M for laptops that features the same chip with slightly slower clock rates and therefore also performance.

The 3D performance lies between the Radeon R7 260X and R7 265X from AMD or between the GTX 750 and GTX 660 from Nvidia. In our tests, the 750 Ti was not able to achieve playable framerates in demanding games and highest settings in 1920x1080 (see benchmarks below).

The power consumption as already mentioned is a strong suite for the GTX 750 Ti and it excels the e.g. slightly slower Radeon R7 260X by a great margin (gaming).