AMD Radeon R7 M440 vs NVIDIA Maxwell GPU Surface Book vs AMD Radeon R7 M445

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 Maxwell GPU Surface Book

The Nvidia Maxwell GPU is a dedicated graphics card in the Microsoft Surface Book laptop. It is based on the Maxwell GM108 chip as the Geforce 940M with 384 shaders. Instead of the DDR3 graphics memory, the Surface Book graphics card features faster GDDR5 memory (both 64 Bit though). 

Thanks to the faster graphics memory, the Surface Book Geforce is performing better than the average GeForce 940M. However, the 945M and GTX 950M are still noticeably faster. Demanding games therefore only run in low settings fluently.

More details can be found in our extensive review of the 2015 Microsoft Surface Book with the dedicated Maxwell GPU.

AMD Radeon R7 M445

The Radeon R7 M445 is an entry-level graphics card for laptops. It is based on the same chip as the old Radeon R7 M340 (and therefore renamed M440) but features faster GDDR5 graphics memory. Although the core speed is slightly reduced, compared to the M440, the general performance is clearly better. On average the gaming performance should be similar to a Nvidia GeForce 940M (or 940MX with DDR3).

The Radeon R7 M445 is produced in 28 nm and still based on an old GCN chip (no new Polaris architecture).