If we want to make the leap to gaming computers, we have two options. We can buy a desktop computer (or better yet, build it ourselves), in which case we will be interested in getting a powerful but not very expensive graphics card .
The other option is to simply buy a gaming laptop . Although at the time this was clearly the worst option, in recent years it has been proposed as an alternative to take into account . And the ‘hardware’ has advanced enough to offer an experience very close to that of a desktop PC, but with the usual portability advantages.
Today, many gamers have another incentive to buy a gaming laptop, with the presentation of the new Radeon RX 7900M from AMD . A GPU with which we are finally going to have an alternative to Nvidia laptops.
New Radeon for laptops
And AMD must have gotten tired of Nvidia taking away the entire high-end market, because this new chip promises to live up to, and surpass, the RTX 4080 for laptops , one of the most popular graphics cards of this type. of Equipements. Achieving such a feat will not be easy, but AMD relies on its RDNA3 platform, of which the RX 7900M has no less than 72 computing units, including ray-tracing accelerators and second-generation Artificial Intelligence.
These accelerators are optimized for AI instructions, something that will be especially useful with machine learning functions such as the one that allows you to improve text when streaming content; Also related to content creation , this GPU has full support for the AV1 codec, both for decoding and encoding videos. On the technical side, the RX 7900M starts with frequencies of 1825 MHz, and can reach up to 2090 MHz. It has 16 GB of integrated memory, with a 256-bit memory bus.
According to AMD, all this is enough to achieve great gaming performance. The goal is 1440p resolution, which is usually widely used in gaming laptops as a good middle ground in image quality in their screen sizes. According to tests published by AMD, the RX 7900M achieved frame rates of 88 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 , no less than 38% higher than the RTX 4080 .
It also demonstrated great performance in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (121 fps), Hogwarts Legacy (94 fps), and Borderlands 3 (133 fps). However, AMD itself confesses that the weak point of its graphics continues to be in ‘ray-tracing’, the technique that simulates light rays for greater realism; In its own tests it was behind Nvidia when this function was activated, although it is true that not as far behind as before (-15% in Forza Horizon 5 and -10% in F1 2022 ).
The first gaming laptop to mount this new graphics will be the new Alienware m18 which, as its name indicates, stands out for its large 18-inch screen. It is a complete AMD laptop, since in addition to the RX 7900M it also uses a processor from the 7045HX range, up to the 16-core Ryzen 9 7945HX, making it the most powerful AMD laptop on the market. It will cost $2,800, with a price to be determined in Spain, and we hope that more brands will soon announce their plans to mount the RX 7900M in their gaming laptops.
