AMD Radeon RX 560 (Laptop) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q vs AMD Radeon RX 580 (Laptop)

AMD Radeon RX 560 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 560 for laptops (RX 560M) is a mid-range Polaris 11 / 21 gaming graphics card for laptops. It was first shown at CES 2017 in the Lenovo Legion Y520 as the "AMD RX 560M" with up to 4 GB GDDR5 VRAM. As the desktop RX 560 it can be based on the Polaris 21 and 11 chip (RX 560 and RX 460) with 986 or 1024 shaders. The performance should be similar to the desktop variants, with slightly reduced clock speeds.

More information on the Polaris architecture and its features can be found here.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with the Max-Q design is a mobile high-end GPU from the Pascal series. It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1070 for laptops based on the cooling capabilities. The base frequency (1101-1215 MHz) is also much lower than on the regular GTX 1070 (1433 MHz, at least -10%) and the Boost (1265-1379 MHz) is also much lower compared to 1645 MHz (at least -6%) for the regular GTX 1070. The memory clock, however, is identical.

The clock is not the only difference compared to the regular GTX 1070 though. The drivers for the Max-Q version were optimized for efficiency (and not performance; only for Max-Q models), there are optimized voltage converters for 1V operation, high-end cooling methods, and a 40 dB limit for the fan noise (with clock adjustments to ensure this at all times).

Features

The GP104 chip is manufactured in 16nm FinFET process at TSMC and offers a range of new features. DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP), improved H.265 video en- and decoders (for PlayReady 3.0) are only some of the improvements. See our detailed Pascal architecture article for more details.

The power consumption of the Max-Q design is notably lower than the normal GTX 1070 for laptops and ranges between 80 and 90 Watt (TGP) according to Nvidia.

AMD Radeon RX 580 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 580 is a high-end graphics card for laptops. It is based on the Polaris 20 chip. Compared to the Polaris 10 in the similar RX 480, the Polaris 20 is manufacted in an improved 14nm process (LPP+) for higher clock speeds and some power efficiency improvements in idle. The performance in laptops depends on the used clock speeds and should be similar to the desktop RX 470 (see for gaming benchmarks) or even RX 480.

More information on the Polaris architecture and its features can be found here.