NVIDIA GeForce GT 735M vs AMD Radeon 520

NVIDIA GeForce GT 735M

The NVIDIA GeForce GT 735M is a DirectX 11 graphics card of the middle class, which has been presented in spring 2013. It is based on the Kepler architecture and manufactured by TSMC in a 28-nanometer process. The GK208 chip (384 shaders) is clocked at up to 889 MHz plus boost and has a 64 bit memory interface (DDR3). Despite the nominally higher classification, the GT 735M is therefore slower than the 128-bit version of the GT 730M.

Architecture

The GK208 is a slightly revised version of the previously Kepler chip GK107. Although both have the same number of shader units (384 ALUs), the memory interface has been cut down from 128 to 64 bits.

The GK208 supports PCIe 3.0 as well as GPU Boost 2.0. This feature can automatically overclock the card if the laptop cooling system allows it. GPU Boost 2.0 is available on any notebook with a graphics card of the 700M series.

Performance

Depending on the clock rate, the performance of the GT 735M is somewhere between the GT 640M LE and the GT 640M. In particular, the narrow memory interface limits the performance significantly. Current games (as of 2013) can thus be played fluently only in low or medium settings. In older titles, there are also reserves for higher quality levels.

Features

The feature set includes support for up to 4 active displays. Furthermore, high resolution monitors of up to 3840x2160 pixels can now be connected using DisplayPort 1.2 or HDMI 1.4a if available. HD-Audio codecs, such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD, can be transmitted via bitstream mode through the HDMI port. However, as most laptops will feature Optimus, the integrated GPU will likely have direct control over the display ports and may limit the feature set available by the Nvidia Kepler cards.

The 5th generation PureVideo HD video processor (VP5) (also integrated in the GK107 core) offers hardware decoding of HD videos. Common codecs such as MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4 ASP, H.264 and VC1/WMV9 are fully supported up to 4K resolutions while VC1 and MPEG-4 are supported up to 1080p. Two streams can be decoded in parallel for features such as Picture-in-Picture. Another feature is the inclusion of a dedicated video encoding engine similar to Intel QuickSync that can be accessed via the NVENCI API.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the GeForce GT 735M should be similar to the old GT 640M LE (about 20 W), as Nvidia describes the card as a "low power" model. As a result, the GPU is best suited for notebooks 13-14 inches in size or greater.

AMD Radeon 520

The Radeon 520 is a dedicated entry-level graphics card for laptops that was released in 2017. AMD reveals that the chip features five compute units based on the GCN architecture and 2 GB GDDR5 64-bit graphics memory. The new chip is not based on the Polaris architecture from 2016, but the old one that was introduced with the Radeon R5 M230 in 2014 and later used in the M330 and M430 / M440 / M445.

Due to the higher clock speed of up to 1030 MHz, the Radeon 520 should be slightly faster than the old Radeon R7 M445 (920 MHz, 320 shader units, GDDR5). However, the performance should be comparable, which means that demanding games like Dishonored 2, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or XCOM 2 should not run smoothly. Less demanding games like Overwatch, Fifa 17 (with a fast CPU) or Farming Simulator 17, would run well, but using low to medium detail settings. For detailed game benchmarks, visit the pages of the previous linked card. If only DDR3 is used, the performance should be on par with the Radeon R7 M440 (1021 MHz, 320 shader units, DDR3).