AMD Radeon RX 540X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M SLI vs AMD Radeon RX 580 (Laptop)

AMD Radeon RX 540X

The AMD Radeon RX 540X is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris 12 chip (most likely). It is manufactured in an improved 14 nm FinFET process and technically similar to the older Radeon RX 540. The only difference so far is a 4% higher theoretical peak performance (1.25 versus 1.2 TFLOPS according to AMD). Compared to Nvidia graphics cards, the gaming performance should be between the GeForce GTX 950M and GTX 960M.

The similar named Radeon 540X (without RX) offers a smaller memory bus and therefore also a slightly reduced performance.

The features of the Radeon RX 540X are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here.

The power envelope of the faster Radeon Pro 460 is rated at 35 Watt according to the AMD blog post. Due to the slower specs, the Radeon RX 540 use slightly less.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M SLI

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M SLI is a high-end DirectX 11-compatible graphics solution for laptops, consisting of two GeForce GTX 980M. Each card has a 28 nm GM204 GPU based on the Maxwell architecture, which is the same chip as found on the GTX 970M as well as several desktop cards. The clocks for the SLI-setup are usually identical to a single GTX 980M (1038 MHz GPU, 1250 MHz memory).

With SLI, each card renders a single frame (AFR mode). Therefore, it may suffer from micro stuttering in low fps ranges of 30 fps. This happens because of different timespans between two frames (e.g., irregular delays between sequential frames).

Architecture

GM204 is based on Nvidia's Maxwell architecture, which replaces the previous Kepler generation. Among other changes, Nvidia have restructured the streaming multi processors (SMM) in order to increase workload and efficiency. Now each SMM contains only 128 shader units and 8 TMUs, which is noticeably less than an equivalent Kepler GPU. The GM204 features four GPCs, and each consists of four SMMs. But, in the GeForce GTX 980M, Nvidia have deactivated 4 of 16 SMMs. As a result, only 1536 shader ALUs and 96 TMUs are active. In addition, there are 64 ROPs in four clusters with 16 units each.

The memory interface has a bandwidth of 256-bits (4x 64 bit) for each of the two GPUs. Thanks to an improved compression algorithm, the connection to the GDDR5 memory should be significantly more efficient per MHz. Furthermore, the L1 (96 KB per SMM) and L2 caches (2 MB) have been significantly increased to lower the needed bandwidth. Compared to the mid-range GM107, the newer and larger GM204 has several additional features and changes. Aside from the improved polymorphic engine in the SSMs, it is also the first Nvidia chip to support DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1.

Performance

With good driver support, SLI almost doubles the performance of a single card. The GTX 980M SLI outperforms the GeForce GTX 970M SLI by about 30 percent and is the fastest mobile graphics solution in late 2014. Compared to the former GTX 880M SLI, the advantage is even bigger (40 - 50 percent). Thus, the GTX 980M SLI is powerful enough to run even the most demanding games with highest details, AA/AF and resolutions exceeding FullHD.

Features

Most of the features are identical to the GeForce GTX 800M series. With the GTX 980M, there can be up to 4 active displays possible, but this will likely decrease due to Optimus. Displays can be connected with a maximum resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels via DisplayPort 1.2 or HDMI 2.0 (no HDCP @ 4K). HD audio formats like Dolby True HD and DTS HD can be sent to a compatible receiver as bitstream. As with previous models, 3D Vision is not supported with Optimus.

The updated video processor VP6 supports the usual formats like H.264 and can also decode and encode H.265 with a resolution of up to 4K via the NVENC API. Several parallel streams, such as picture-in-picture in a Blu-Ray movie, are also possible.

Further features of the GTX 900M series, which are also partly supported by older cards, include Battery Boost (longer battery life during gaming), Shadowplay (recording of gaming videos up to 4K60p and 130 Mbit/s) and Gamestream (game streaming on Shield console). More information on these features are available here.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of each GeForce GTX 980M including its MXM board and memory should be about the same as a GTX 880M with a specified TDP of 122 W, leading to a total TDP of about 240 W. Given the significantly higher performance, this can be considered a massive increase in performance-per-watt. Nevertheless, the SLI setup can only be used in very large and heavy gaming notebooks with powerful cooling systems. Under low load, dynamic clock rates help the GPUs to save energy.

AMD Radeon RX 580 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 580 is a high-end graphics card for laptops. It is based on the Polaris 20 chip. Compared to the Polaris 10 in the similar RX 480, the Polaris 20 is manufacted in an improved 14nm process (LPP+) for higher clock speeds and some power efficiency improvements in idle. The performance in laptops depends on the used clock speeds and should be similar to the desktop RX 470 (see for gaming benchmarks) or even RX 480.

More information on the Polaris architecture and its features can be found here.