For years, any type of semi-serious gaming required having a discrete graphics card. While that’s still the preferred way to do it, modern integrated GPUs can do quite a lot, as can be seen in this benchmark of the new AMD Radeon 890M. The GPU, bundled in the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, may not give you Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra settings, but it can rival some of Nvidia’s most popular discrete GPUs.
Of course, we’re not talking about the likes of the RTX 4080 Super, but about cards from several generations ago. However, that doesn’t make them any less popular in the Steam Hardware Survey. For example, Nvidia’s GTX 1650 is the second-mostused GPU in the latest survey results, and it has been for some time — and it also happens to be one of the cards that the Radeon 890M can keep up with.
Let’s take a closer look at benchmark results. An Asus ProArt P16 laptop with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (a name that will always be a mouthful) was tested in Geekbench Vulkan and OpenCL benchmarks, scoring 46,298 points and 42,932 points, respectively. As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the score puts it right up there with discrete GPUs that we’ve been seeing in desktops and laptops for years.
The Radeon 890M beats one of AMD’s most popular GPUs of all time, the RX 580, which scored 41,991 points, and it’s just above the RX 5500 (42,395 points in the OpenGL test). It fared significantly better in Vulkan, as the RX 5500 only managed to hit 38,138 points in that test. Nvidia’s GPUs are also close, including the GTX 1070 with 45,011 points and the GTX 1650 Ti (mobile version) with 44,708. The Radeon 890M turned out to only be around 15% slower than the GTX 1650 Super. For the base version of the GTX 1650, we found the Radeon 890M to be significantly faster in the Vulkan test.
This is just one benchmark result, so it’s hard to determine just how decent the performance of the Radeon 890M really is — but AMD’s own data supports the Geekbench results. Although AMD didn’t disclose any exact performance figures, it claims that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is up to 1.65x faster than the competition (Intel’s Core Ultra 9 185H and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite) in Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, we don’t know whether this means the game was actually playable — likely not very much so — but that’s still a decent lead.
When you think about it, comparing the Radeon 890M to an old GPU like the GTX 1650 may not seem like much, but it’s a pretty big leap. Many gamers still run these last-last-last gen GPUs in their PCs with great success. I personally had a GTX 1060 until just last year, and was able to play games like Elden Ring just fine. Of course, there’s more to it in a laptop, including battery life, but it’s safe to say that we’re finally at a time when gamers with iGPUs can still play many titles with ease.
