AMD Radeon R7 M440 vs NVIDIA GeForce 940MX vs AMD Radeon R7 M460

AMD Radeon R7 M440

The AMD Radeon R7 M440 is a entry level dedicated graphics card for laptops introduced in mid 2016. The technical details are the same as the previous Radeon R9 M340. Therefore it offers 320 shader cores clocked at 1,120 MHz and 2 GB DDR3 graphics memory at 1000 MHz with a 64 Bit interface. The chip is produced in 28 nm and not the new 14 nm process as the Polaris RX 400M series cards.

The gaming performance is comparable to the Radeon R7 M340 (as it has the same specs) or an Nvidia GeForce 920M. Therefore, demanding games of 2015 and 2016 may only be playable in the lowest detail settings and low resolutions.

NVIDIA GeForce 940MX

The Nvidia GeForce 940MX is a mid-range laptop graphics card with DirectX 12 support (FL 11_0). It has been announced in the first quarter of 2016 and is the refresh of the GeForce 940M. Compared to the older card, the new one is based on the same chip but now supports faster GDDR5. Therefore, it is similar to the Maxwell GPU in the Microsoft Surface Book but with more memory and higher clock speeds. However, most notebook vendors will use the slower DDR3 version of the 940MX that clocks only a few percent faster than the old GeForce 940M (1122 versus 1072 MHz base clock e.g.). 

For the GDDR5 version of the 940MX there appears to be also a variant with the GM107-B chip with 512 shaders instead of the 384 but lower clock speeds. The 940MX in the Acer Aspire E5-774G e.g. featured 512 shader cores (GM107) clocked at 795 - 861 MHz. The Dell Inspiron 17 7778 version however had the GM108 chip with 384 shaders clocked at 1083 - 1189 MHz.

The performance greatly depends on the used graphics memory and chip. According to our benchmarks (see below), the DDR3 version is very similar to the old 940M (due to only minor increased clock rates). The GDDR5 version however pushes ahead 20% (even 30% if paired with a fast desktop quad-core, but we lack 940M reference scores). Therefore, demanding games from 2015 should run fluently in low to medium settings and WXGA resolution. 

The TDP of the card should be rated at about 15 to 30 Watt (depending on the version, clock speeds and memory). Therefore, the GPU is best suited for laptops from 13-inch and up.

AMD Radeon R7 M460

The AMD Radeon R7 M460 is an entry level graphics card for laptops. It was announced in the Lenovo Yoga 510 (15-inch-model) in early 2016. The technical details are more or less identical to the older Radeon R7 M360 (see for benchmarks). Only the core speed was increased  slightly by 8 MHz in our test sample.