AMD Radeon RX 640 vs Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 vs AMD Radeon 630

AMD Radeon RX 640

The AMD Radeon RX 640 is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris architecture. It features 640 shaders (10 CUs) or 512 shaders (8 CUs) with different clock speeds. Compared to the older RX 550(X), the RX 640 seems to offer only half of the memory bandwidth (64 Bit memory bus instead of 128 Bit).

The performance should be slightly lower than the old RX 550 and therefore a Nvidia GeForce MX150. Only low demanding games are therefore playable with the GPU. In our benchmarks of the Thinkpad E15 the RX640 is slightly slower than an average GeForce MX330 (+4%) / MX250 / MX150. Therefore, the performance may not be enough for very demanding games. For example, Ghost Recon Breakpoint only achieved 26 fps on average in the lowest settings.

Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650

The Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 (GT3e) is a processor graphics card for Kaby Lake models announced in January 2017. As the successor to the Intel Iris Graphics 550 (Skylake), the Iris Plus Graphics 650 is used for 28-Watt models and is equipped with 64 MB eDRAM cache. There should not be any big changes compared to the Iris Graphics 550.

The so called GT3e version of the Kaby Lake GPU probably still has 48 Execution Units (EUs), which can reach up to 1100 MHz depending on the model. Besides eDRAM cache, the Iris 650 can also access the system memory (2x 64 Bit DDR3L-1600/DDR4-2400) via processor interface.

Compared to the Iris Plus 640 from the 15-Watt models, the Iris 650 only has a slightly higher maximum clock as well as almost twice the TDP, which allows a better utilization of the Turbo Boost potential.

Performance

The exact performance of the Iris Plus Graphics 650 depends on the CPU model, because maximum clock as well as the size of the L3 cache can differ a bit. The system memory (DDR3/DDR4) will influence the performance as well.

The fastest chips are high-clocked Core i7 models like the Core i7-7567U. Depending on the game, the Iris Plus 650 will probably be on par with a dedicated GeForce 930M and can handle smooth gameplay in modern titles in low up to medium settings.

Features

The reworked video engine now fully supports hardware decoding of H.265/HEVC videos. Contrary to Skylake, however, Kaby Lake can now also decode H.265/HEVC Main 10 with a 10-bit color depth as well as Google's VP9 codec. The video output is possible via DP 1.2/eDP 1.3 (up to 3840 x 2160 @60 Hz), whereas HDMI is also supported in the older 1.4a standard. An HDMI 2.0 output can be added via converter from DisplayPort. The GPU can drive up to three displays simultaneously.

Power Consumption

The Iris Plus Graphics 650 is used for 28-Watt processor and therefore medium-sized notebooks.

AMD Radeon 630

The Radeon 630 is a dedicated entry-level graphics card for laptops that was released in 2019. AMD reveals that the chip features eight compute units based on the GCN architecture and 4 GB GDDR5 64-bit graphics memory. The chip is most likely based on the Polaris architecture and therefore a rebrand of the old Radeon RX 540 / RX 540X.

The gaming performance is positioned in the entry level and therefore only a few modern games are playable fluently. See our RX 540 page for game benchmarks.