The AMD Mobility Radeon HD 6950M (or sometimes called ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6950) is a high-end graphics card generally used for big and heavy laptops. It is based on the desktop HD 6850 graphics card and therefore features the new UVD3 video processor, increased Tessellation performance and Eyefinity+. The codename of this GPU is Blackcomb Pro and it should have similar power consumption as the GeForce GTX 470M. Compared to the faster HD 6970M, the 6950M's core is clocked slower by at least 100 MHz.
The 960 Stream processors should be still based on the "old" 5D architecture, similar to the 5000 series. Therefore, the number of shaders in the 6950M is not comparable to the 1D cores of current Nvidia GPUs. The Tessellation performance, however, should be improved (like the desktop 6800 series) with the new cards. The Stream processors can be used with DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL. With the latter two, the cores of the 6950M can also be used for general computations like video transcoding.
The 3D performance is on par with the GeForce GTX 470M in the high end class of notebook graphic cards. For gamers, this means that the Radeon HD 6950M is able to fluently play most modern games (as of 2011) in high detail settings. Only Crysis and Metro 2033 will stutter in the highest detail settings at 1920x1080 resolution (see below).
The new UVD3 video decoder supports the decoding of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, Flash and now also Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos on the graphics card.
Furthermore, the HD 6900M series integrates an HD audio controller to transmit HD Audio (TrueHD or DTS Master Audio) over HDMI and DisplayPort (e.g., for Blu-Ray videos).
The AMD HD3D Technology offers support for Blu-Ray 3D and 3D displays (integrated and external). However, the solution is not as mature as Nvidia's 3D Vision.
Thanks to Eyefinity, the graphics chip is able to theoretically drive up to 6 monitors simultaneously provided that the notebook itself has enough video-out ports.
The power consumption of the 6950M should be similar to the Nvidia GeForce GTX470M and is therefore only suited for medium to large laptops with good cooling solutions.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 6GB Laptop GPU (mobile, GN20-P0-R, 2023 Refresh) is the refresh of the RTX 3050 4GB Laptop GPU (slowest RTX 3000 mobile card) and also based on the GA107 Ampere chip. The 6GB variant offers more CUDA cores (2,560, +25%) but a cut down memory bus to 96 Bit. The clock speed depends on the TGP variant and can range from 713 - 1530 (base) and 1058 - 1740 (boost) for the TGP variants of 35 to 80 Watt (see table below).
The performance is between the old 4GB RTX 3050 and the RTX 3050 Ti and therefore best suited for full HD gaming (1920 x 1080) in medium to high graphic settings. The performance is not sufficient to enable Raytracing in most games, but the Tensor cores can be used for DLSS in some games (and get performance boost with slight quality reduction). Beware, that the low TGP variants will offer a significantly lower performance.
The GA107 chip offers 3,072 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,536 INT32 ALUs). The RTX 3050 however maybe won't use all ALUs on the chip. With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).
The GA107 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip).
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.