ATI FirePro M7740 vs ATI FirePro M7820

ATI FirePro M7740

The AMD ATI FirePro M7740 is a high-end professional graphics adapter for laptops. It suppports certified drivers for professional CAD (Computer aided Design) and DCC (Digital Content Creation) applications. In addition to the guarantee that these programs run flawlessly, the driver and BIOS are also optimized for OpenGL performance and even enables a few professional features in the GPU (e.g., anti-aliasing).

The core of the FirePro M7740 is based on the consumer Mobility Radeon HD 4860 under the RV740 architecture. The GPU is produced at TSMC in 40nm and offers 640 (or 128 5-D) unified shaders that support DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.1. As for graphics memory, the card supports up to 1 GB of GDDR5 with a 128 bit memory bus. Due to the relatively fast speeds from GDDR5, the relatively small memory bus should not be a noticeable bottle neck.

The ATI FirePro / FireGL M7740 was introduced in the Dell Precision M6400 mobile workstation as an alternative to the already available Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M. AMD was able to compare both graphics cards in a subset of the SPECviewperf 10 OpenGL benchmark. The FirePro M7740 in the Dell Precision M6400 was compared to an Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M in an HP 8730w. According to AMD, the M7740 won in 8 subsets of the benchmark (ugnx-01, tcvis-01, sw-02, proe-04, maya-02, ensight-03, 3dsmax-04) and in the Composite Score (approx. 75 versus 63).

Compared to desktop workstation cards, the M7740 should perform better than the FirePro V7750, the latter of which includes only 320 stream processors and GDDR3 memory.

Like the Mobility Radeon HD 4860, the Mobility Fire Pro M7740 features the UVD 2 video processor for decoding of HD video streams. The GPU should be fully compliant to Blu-ray specs with the possibility to decode up two streams simultaneously.

ATI FirePro M7820

The AMD ATI FirePro M7820 is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the same chip as the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 and is therefore positioned in the high end segment for large laptops. The certified drivers of the FirePro M7820 offer better performance in professional applications (like DCC or CAD). OpenGL performance has also been optimized with regards to synthetic and gaming benchmarks.