On the same day AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper and Threadripper PRO processors, the company quietly launched a new graphics card, the Radeon RX 7900M. The Radeon RX 7900M is AMD’s most powerful mobile GPU to date, utilising the Navi 31 die that also powers their flagship Radeon RX 7900XT and 7900XTX. This ensures an impressive specification sheet that could rival many desktop GPUs in terms of performance.
AMD’s new Radeon RX 7900M is aimed at challenging NVIDIA’s mobile GeForce RTX 4080. According to AMD, their flagship GPU is 7% faster at QHD resolutions. The mobile flagship RDNA3-based GPU boasts 72 Compute Units, 16GB of GDDR6 memory, 64MB of Infinity cache, and a robust 576GB/s of memory bandwidth, making it competitive with most desktop GPUs.
However, this high performance comes at a price – a power consumption of 180W. While this is lower than desktop counterparts, the direct competition features a flagship mobile GPU with just 110W power consumption. Consequently, the Radeon RX 7900M is expected to be exclusive to the most powerful gaming notebooks available. The Alienware M18 is the first of these notebooks to feature AMD’s new graphics processor.
Although independent testing has not yet been conducted, it appears that, in certain instances, the performance can match that of the desktop Radeon RX 7800XT, which is quite impressive considering the substantial power draw and higher clock frequencies of the latter. It is anticipated that the Radeon RX 7900M will become available in more gaming notebooks, hopefully surpassing the limited reach of the Radeon RX 6000 mobile series.