AMD is Working on Mobile Gaming Performance

At an event in Los Angeles last week, AMD explained in more detail all the changes brought by the Zen 5 CPU architecture. The chip giant also briefly unveiled what’s new in RDNA 3.5 – a “partial optimization” “bolted” onto the existing graphics processor design. In short, it’s all about boosting mobile gaming performance.

AMD’s RDNA 3.5 GPU Focuses on Boosting Mobile Gaming Performance

The updated design was introduced by Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer. Papermaster said the changes are the result of a collaboration with Samsung, which has licensed AMD’s graphics technology for its Exynos line of smartphone and tablet processors.

RDNA 3.5 exists to improve some of the performance bottlenecks AMD’s GPUs face when used in low power, low shader count configurations. These improvements specifically target integrated Radeon GPUs in mobile APUs used in notebooks and handheld gaming PCs. For example, while a Radeon RX 6400 can use up to 54W of power, the GPU in the Asus ROG Ally needs to consume 80% less power.

One of the biggest improvements Papermaster noted was doubling the texture sampling capacity of each CU. In RDNA 3.5, each CU has eight texture units instead of four. This allows mobile GPUs to get twice as many texels per clock cycle, compensating for lower core clocks.

AMD’s presentation slides state that this doubling is only for “a subset of the most common texture sampling operations”. This is supported by other performance-enhancing features such as memory management improvements and vector-heavy operations. For example, operations involving multiple data reads from vector registration files have also been improved in RDNA 3.5.

RDNA 3.5 also has better memory compression algorithms and the iGPU’s memory controller is optimized for portable gaming PCs and laptops. To summarize, with RDNA 3.5, AMD aims to deliver more performance with the same or less energy on mobile devices.

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