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AMD Radeon Vega 9 Mobile

AMD Radeon Vega 9 Mobile: Compact Graphics for Everyday Tasks

April 2025

In the world of mobile GPUs, the AMD Radeon Vega 9 Mobile remains a popular choice for budget and mid-range laptops. Despite the architecture's age, this integrated graphics card continues to find its niche due to its balance of price and performance. Let’s explore what makes it noteworthy in 2025.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Vega Architecture: A Time-Tested Foundation

Vega 9 Mobile is based on the Vega microarchitecture, which AMD introduced back in 2017. However, optimizations and the transition to a 7nm manufacturing process (in the 2023-2024 versions) have improved energy efficiency. The GPU includes 9 compute units (CUs) with 576 stream processors, which is a respectable figure for an integrated solution.

Unique Features

- FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR): Support for FSR 2.2 (upscaling with detail enhancement) helps increase FPS in games without significantly sacrificing quality.

- Radeon Image Sharpening: Improves image clarity, which is beneficial when gaming at 1080p resolution.

- Lack of Hardware Ray Tracing: Unlike RDNA2/RDNA3, Vega 9 lacks ray tracing blocks, making RT effects in games unavailable or severely reducing performance.

2. Memory: Flexibility and Limitations

Type and Volume

Vega 9 Mobile utilizes system RAM (DDR4 or LPDDR4X). The amount of VRAM allocated dynamically adjusts up to 2 GB, but actual performance depends on RAM speed. For instance, at a frequency of 3200 MHz, bandwidth reaches 51.2 GB/s, which is half of what GDDR5 achieves in discrete GPUs from 2018-2020.

Impact on Gaming

Using dual-channel memory (2×8 GB) leads to an average FPS increase of 15-20% in CS:GO compared to single-channel mode. For maximum performance, at least 16 GB of RAM (two 8 GB modules) is recommended.

3. Gaming Performance: Realistic Expectations

1080p: Comfort for Undemanding Projects

- CS:GO: 70-90 FPS at medium settings.

- Dota 2: 50-60 FPS (high settings, without FSR).

- Genshin Impact: 40-45 FPS (medium settings + FSR Balanced).

- Cyberpunk 2077: 20-25 FPS (low settings + FSR Performance), which is suitable only for a leisurely story mode.

1440p and 4K: Not Practical

Even with FSR, resolutions above 1080p lead to FPS drop below 30 frames in most modern games. The exception is older titles like Half-Life 2 (1440p/60 FPS).

Ray Tracing: Lack of Support

Vega 9 struggles with RT effects even in hybrid mode (e.g., via FSR). In games that require RT, such as Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, it cannot run.

4. Professional Tasks: Minimal Capabilities

Video Editing

In Adobe Premiere Pro, rendering 1080p videos takes 2-3 times longer than on discrete GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA RTX 3050 Mobile). It is recommended to use proxy files and disable GPU acceleration for complex effects.

3D Modeling

Blender and AutoCAD run, but scenarios with high polygon counts cause lag. Acceptable for learning or simple projects, but insufficient for professional work.

Scientific Computing

OpenCL compatibility allows the use of Vega 9 for basic machine learning (e.g., in TensorFlow), but speeds are 5-10 times slower than NVIDIA GPUs with CUDA.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Output

TDP and Cooling

The TDP of Vega 9 Mobile is 10-15 W (part of the Ryzen 5 APU). This is sufficient for passive cooling in ultrabooks or compact coolers in budget laptops.

Case Selection Tips

- Avoid overly thin (less than 15mm) cases — throttling may occur during prolonged loads.

- Laptops with ventilation holes on the sides (e.g., Lenovo IdeaPad 5) exhibit better stability.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon 780M (RDNA3): 40-60% faster in games, supports ray tracing, but is more expensive.

NVIDIA GeForce MX550: Better in DirectX 12 (by 15-20%), but inferior in energy efficiency.

Intel Iris Xe (96 EU): Comparable in speed, but poorer driver optimization for older games.

Price Range

In 2025, laptops with Vega 9 Mobile cost $400-$600, while models with Radeon 780M start at $700.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply

A standard 65 W adapter is sufficient. For gaming sessions, connect the laptop to a power source to avoid battery throttling.

Compatibility

- Only compatible with AMD Ryzen 5000/6000/7000 series platforms.

- When connecting to an external monitor, use USB-C with DisplayPort support.

Drivers

- Regularly update software via AMD Adrenalin Edition.

- For games with crashes, try driver version 23.12.1 — it is stable for Vega.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low power consumption.

- Sufficient for office work, study, and light gaming.

- Supports modern interfaces (HDMI 2.1, USB4).

Cons:

- Weak performance in AAA games.

- Dependent on RAM speed.

- No hardware ray tracing.

9. Final Conclusion: Who is Vega 9 Mobile For?

This GPU is the choice for those who:

- Seek an affordable laptop (up to $600) for work, study, and occasional gaming.

- Value battery life (6-8 hours during web surfing).

- Do not plan to run the latest games at high settings.

Alternatives: If your budget allows for $700+, consider laptops with Radeon 780M or NVIDIA RTX 2050.

Vega 9 Mobile in 2025 is a "workhorse" for basic tasks. It won't impress with performance, but it will provide reliability and cost savings.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Integrated

Launch Date

October 2019

Model Name

Radeon Vega 9 Mobile

Generation

Picasso

Base Clock

300MHz

Boost Clock

1300MHz

Bus Interface

IGP

Transistors

4,940 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

GlobalFoundries

Process Size

14 nm

Architecture

GCN 5.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

System Shared

Memory Type

System Shared

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

System Shared

Memory Clock

SystemShared

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

System Dependent

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

10.40 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

46.80 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

2.995 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

93.60 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.468 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

576

TDP

15W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.2

OpenCL Version

2.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_1)

Shader Model

6.4

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.468 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Quadro K4100M

1.594 +8.6%

Radeon RX 640 Mobile

1.528 +4.1%

Radeon Vega 9 Mobile

1.468

GeForce GTX 950M

1.41 -4%

Jetson AGX Xavier GPU

1.382 -5.9%