The AMD Radeon HD 8870M is a 28nm DirectX 11 graphics card based on the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. Built primarily for large laptops, the card is positioned in the performance category as of 2013. Compared to the similar Radeon HD 7870M, the 8870M offers higher memory clock speeds at the cost of a slightly slower core clock.
The design of the Radeon 8800M series has its roots to the Cape Verde chip as found, for example, on the desktop Radeon HD 7770 with 640 1D shader cores and 40 texture units. The core clock of the 8870M, however, is only 725 MHz (or up to 775 MHz with Boost) versus the 1000 MHz of the HD 7770.
As a result, general performance of the HD 8870M is somewhere between the 7750 and 7770 desktop Radeon cards and similar to the GeForce GTX 670M. Most games of 2013 can be played fluently in high detail settings and resolutions, some older titels even with additional AA/AF.
The 640 shader cores can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations (as 10 compute units).
Features of the 8870M include video decoding via UVD3 for decoding MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Flash directly from the AMD GPU. Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos are now compatible as well.
The Radeon 8800M 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 8870M can directly support up to 6 connected monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.
Other features of the 8800M series 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 now allows audio to output simultaneously and in parallel to multiple devices with the new Discrete Digital Multipoint Audio (DDMA) feature.
Power consumption of the 8870M should be around 50 W. Therefore, the 8870M is only suited for larger laptops and DTRs.
- Range of benchmark values - Average benchmark values * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.
- Average benchmark values
