AMD Radeon R7 M370 vs AMD Radeon R7 M380

AMD Radeon R7 M370

The AMD Radeon R7 M370 is a lower mid-range graphics card for laptops that was announced mid 2015. It is based on the 28nm Mars chip that uses the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. Therefore, it is similar to the older Radeon R9 M260X but slightly lower clocked.

Performance

Thanks to its relatively high memory bandwidth, the performance of the Radeon R7 M370 is similar to the Nvidia GeForce 830M. Current and demanding games of 2015 will run fluently only low or medium resolutions and detail settings. In older games, however, higher quality settings will be possible.

The 384 shaders can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 6 compute units). Compared to old TeraScale 2 chips, the GCN-based Mars architecture offers improved performance in this framework.

Features

Features of the R7 M370 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 M265 can directly support multiple monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.

Other features include ZeroCore for reducing power consumption when the display is turned off and Power Gating to power down areas of the chip that are not used. PowerTune allows automatic overclocking and underclocking of the graphics card as long as the GPU is within its TDP limit. For example, the chip may be underclocked when running FurMark and OCCT, but will overclock in certain games like Lost Planet, Crysis or Resident Evil 5.

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.

Power consumption

The power consumption should be similar to the old Radeon HD 8670M and slightly above the Maxwell-based Nvidia GeForce 830M. As a result, the R7 M370 is best suited for 13-inch notebooks or larger.

AMD Radeon R7 M380

The AMD Radeon R7 M380 is a dedicated graphics card for laptops. It is based on the a 28nm GCN core with 10 compute units and a 128 Bit DDR3 memory bus. Despite the similar name, the R9 M380 offers a better performance due to 2 more compute units and GDDR5 graphics memory. The R7 M380 is similar to the R9 M375 (which is slightly higher clocked) and therefore is position in the mid-range in 2015.

Performance

If slow DDR3 graphics memory is used, the performance should be somewhere close to a Radeon R9 M270 (see for gaming benchmarks). Therefore, demanding games are running in low to medium details.

The 640 shaders can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 10 compute units).

Features

Features of the R7-M380 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 M380 can directly support multiple monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.

Other features include ZeroCore to reduce the 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.