The AMD Radeon R9 M270 is an upper mid-range, DirectX 12-capable graphics card for notebooks. It is manufactured in 28nm and based on the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture from AMD. The R9 M270 is probably just a renamed Radeon HD 8870M with 640 shader units (725 - 775 MHz) and up to 4 GB of GDDR5 memory (1125 MHz / 4500 MHz effective).
According to this information (not yet officially confirmed), the performance of the R9 M270 should exactly match its predecessor. Thus, the GPU should be somewhat slower than a Nvidia GeForce GTX 760M.
Please note: The technical specifications and clock rates are based on speculation and have not been verified by the manufacturer. The R9 M270 has been first seen in the Lenovo Y40.
The AMD Radeon R9 M280X is a 28 nm DirectX 12 graphics card based on the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. Built primarily for large laptops, the card is positioned in the upper mid-range category as of 2014. It is based on the Saturn chip (Bonaire codename for Desktop R7 260(X)) and clocked at 900 to 1000 MHz (Boost). The R9 M280X offers 896 shader cores, 56 TMUs, 16 ROPs and a 128 Bit memory interface for up to 4 GB GDDR5 memory (1375 MHz / 5500 MHz effective, 88 GB/s).
The performance of the Radeon R9 M280X is on par with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 850M or GTX 950M. Games from 2015 therefore should run in middle to high settings in 1080p. Some more demanding games like Assassin's Creed Unity may only run fluently in reduced settings.
The 640 shader cores can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 10 compute units).
Features of the R9 series include video decoding via UVD3 for decoding MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Flash directly from the AMD GPU. Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos are now compatible as well.
The Radeon R9 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. Other features include ZeroCore for reducing power consumption when the display is turned off .
The Power consumption of the R9 M280X is not specified but should be around 70 to 80 Watt and therefore, the GPU is only suited for larger laptops and DTRs.
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.