AMD Radeon R7 M360 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (Desktop)

AMD Radeon R7 M360

The AMD Radeon R7 M360 is a dedicated lower-mid-range graphics card for laptops that was announced in mid 2015. It is based on a new derivative of the Tonga chip and therefore supports DirectX 12, Vulkan and FreeSync. The core is clocked at relatively high 1015 MHz, however, the bottleneck may be the use of slow 64-bit DDR3 graphics memory.

Performance

The performance of the R7-M360 is slightly above the slower clocked Radeon R7 M260 (64-bit model) and silimar to a GeForce 920M. Therefore, very demanding modern games like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Evolve are only playable at the lowest graphics settings.

The 384 shaders can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 10 compute units).

Features

Features of the R7-M360 include video decoding for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Flash directly by the AMD GPU. Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos are compatible as well.

The R7 series also supports automatic graphics switching between the integrated GPU and discrete GPU. Called Enduro, the technology supersedes AMD's Dynamic Switchable Graphics and is similar to Nvidia's Optimus. Furthermore, the M375 can directly support multiple monitors using the Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.

Other features include ZeroCore for a reduced power consumption when the display is turned off and Power Gating to power down areas of the chip that are not used. 

The integrated HD audio processor is able to transmit HD Audio (TrueHD or DTS Master Audio) over HDMI and DisplayPort (e.g., for Blu-Ray videos). Additionally, it allows audio output simultaneously and in parallel to multiple devices with the new Discrete Digital Multipoint Audio (DDMA) feature.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 is a graphics card for desktops and high end laptops (upcoming, see our article for the mobile GTX 1060 for benchmarks and specs). It is based on the Pascal architecture and manufactured in 16 nm FinFET at TSMC. The GPU is be based on the smaller GP106 chip. In laptops it has the codename N17E-G1 and will be the successor to the old GTX 970M (predecessor). The laptop version should be launched in August 2016. The desktop version is already out.

The performance of the 6 GB version is on par with an older GeForce GTX 980 (desktop and laptop). Therefore, 1080p gaming at highest detail is currently the best use case for the card. A comprehensive review of the desktop GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition with 6 GB GDDR5 can be found here. Beware, the upcoming 3 GB desktop variant should feature 128 shader less but clocked slightly higher. Still the performance should be definately slower than the 6 GB version.