AMD Radeon 530 vs NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M SLI

AMD Radeon 530

The Radeon 530 is a dedicated entry-level graphics card for laptops that was released in 2017. According to AMD, there are several different versions with 384 or 320 shader units and DDR3 or GDDR5 64-bit graphics memory. However, they are not based on one of the newer RX series Polaris chips, but most likely using the same architecture as the Radeon R7 M445 / M440 / M340 / M260 / 8650M / 8590M (384 shader units, 28 nm GCN) and M430 / M330 / M230 (320 shader units, 28 nm Sun GCN). AMD claims that the clock speed of the Radeon 530 can reach 1,024 MHz.

Considering the above, the game performance of the Radeon 530 should fall between the Radeon R7 M440 (320 shader units, DDR3), Radeon R7 M460 (384 shader units, DDR3) and Radeon R7 M445 (320 shader units, GDDR5) (see these pages for detailed gaming benchmarks). Graphically intensive games such as Dishonored 2, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or XCOM 2 should not run smoothly on this GPU. 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 previously linked cards. According to the specs, the DDR3 version could be slower than the Radeon 520, that is specified with 320 shaders and GDDR5.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M SLI

The NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M SLI is a high-end DirectX 11-compatible graphics solution for laptops, consisting of two GeForce GT 750M. Each card has a 28nm GK107 core based on the Kepler architecture. With SLI, each card usually renders a single frame (AFR mode). Therefore, it may suffer from micro stuttering in low fps ranges of 30fps. This happens because of different timespans between two frames (e.g., irregular delays between sequential frames).

Architecture

The GK107 Kepler core offers two shader blocks, called SMX, each with 192 shaders for a total of 384 shader cores that are clocked at the same speed as the processor core. Although more shader cores are available in the Kepler architecture as compared to the Fermi design, the Kepler shaders are expected to be up to two times more power efficient. However, due to the missing hot clock of the shader domain, two shaders of a Kepler chip are as fast as one shader of a Fermi chip, even though Fermi shaders are clocked at twice the speed.

PCIe 3.0 is now supported by the mobile Kepler series and GPU Boost 2.0 can automatically overclock the card if the laptop cooling system allows it. This feature is available on any notebook with a graphics card of the 700M series.

Performance

Equipped with fast GDDR5 memory, the GT 750M SLI performs similar to a single GeForce GTX 675MX or GeForce GTX 770M.  Depending on the game, there can be big differences here, depending on how well SLI scales in a particular case. Overall, most current games (as of 2013) can be played fluently in 1080p and (very) high settings.

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.

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 750M SLI doubles compared to a single 750M, reaching about 70 - 80 W. As a result, the Nvidia GPU is only suited for larg gaming notebooks.