Testing the performance of AMD Radeon 780M & 760M iGPUs with new drivers

In synthetic benchmarks, there wasn’t any improvement in performance, and the ROG Ally gaming handheld continued to lead the field thanks to its faster memory. In general, it remains true that the Radeon 780M is only slightly ahead of the older Radeon 680M. The 760M had a significantly better showing, with a substantial boost in performance of 25% to nearly 50% over a snappy variant of the previous Radeon 660M (in the ThinkPad T16). Looking at the results, it is quite apparent that the Radeon 780M has relatively weak performance. We’ll have to wait and see whether future driver updates can produce any improvement here.

Gaming results on the new driver version are once again sobering for the Radeon 780M. There are generally no real differences between this iGPU and the previous Radeon 680M. In most cases, you’ll still be limited to Full HD gaming at medium to high settings. The Radeon 760M, on the other hand, managed to pull clear of the older Radeon 660M and isn’t currently that far-off from the 780M in gaming benchmarks. If you look at the specs of both iGPUs, the 780M should in theory have a larger lead over the 760M. This prompted us to repeat our tests multiple times – without seeing any differences in the results. There are also further reports online mentioning the 780M performs worse with the new driver version, but the 760M doesn’t seem to be affected by this. 

Memory continues to play a crucial role in the performance of integrated GPUs, and our HP EliteBook G10 test unit illustrates this very clearly. Right out of the box, our review configuration is only equipped with a single RAM module, which markedly reduces graphics performance. When paired with single-channel RAM, the Radeon 780M often performs worse than the Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 with 96 EUs and only offers a marginal improvement over the older RX Vega 8 iGPU, which is still used by AMD in some current APUs (e.g. Ryzen 7 7730U). If you want to game a little on a laptop with an iGPU, there is no getting around a dual-channel configuration.

Our testing has clearly shown that the driver situation remains fraught at AMD: not only did it take them three months to release the first official driver after the products’ launch, the driver itself barely improves the Radeon 780M’s performance. There were even some reports of people getting substantially worse gaming performance with the new driver, which thankfully isn’t the case during our testing. On the other hand, considering the great results delivered by the lower-tier Radeon 760M and its performance edge over the previous Radeon 660M, you’ll quickly realise that we haven’t yet witness the full potential of the Radeon 780M. 

The first official driver for the Radeon 780M is a disappointment: the iGPU continues to offer a similar level of performance as the older Radeon 680M, and performance can sometimes even be worse than with pre-release drivers. AMD urgently needs to improve the situation.

It remains vital for systems with iGPUs to be kitted out with dual-channel RAM, or else performance will suffer massively. In single-channel mode, even the Radeon 780M only runs slightly faster than the old RX Vega 8 and is just on par with Intel’s Iris Xe Graphics G7 performance-wise. By contrast, we are positively surprised by the Radeon 760M. Most of all, this makes cheaper laptops with the new Ryzen 5 CPUs attractive and also means they can provide you with a decent gaming experience at 1080p.

Of course, we will continue to keep track of the situation and repeat our tests as soon as AMD releases new drivers.