Comparing possible new graphic cards

I’m considering 3 different laptops, which contain 3 different video cards (all ATI Radeons). I’ve also found 2 sites which seem to benchmark a lot of cards:

PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmark Charts - Video Card Model List
This site uses something called the G3D benchmark.

Mobile Graphics Cards - Benchmark List - Notebookcheck.net Tech
This site uses various 3DMark, of which Vantage seems to be the latest.

Comparing the number for each site, and each card (including my current machine, what I’ll primarily be comparing against):

Code:

Card          G3D-Score	 G3D-Rank  3DM-Score  3DM-Rank
6490          644        1         1989       3
6550          613        2         3152       1
6630          575        3         3149       2
3650(current) 249                  1024

They differ by a lot. This leads to the questions:

1. Which benchmark is more realistic or accurate? Most notably, the 6490 varies wildly between the benchmarks.
2. I would have (perhaps naively) assumed that increasing model numbers meant increased performance. There does not seem to be significant difference between the 6630 and 6550?
3. Would the 6490 be “good enough” given that on paper is seems to be minimally twice as fast as what I have now?
4. What’s also scary is that apparently the new Intel HD 3000 onboard graphics out-do my current video card (on paper, at least). However I’ve seen it in practice and it required game graphic settings to be cranked way down, and looked a bit ugly. Anyone know why that might be?

Thanks!

 

I would go with the 6550m, it has a few less shaders than the 6630m, but the memory is faster and it's clocked higher. You should be able to get better overall performance even after overclocking with the 6550m.

As far as Intel goes, framerate-wise it might be close, but their image quality and drivers are horrible.

 

FYI 3dmark Vantage is not the newest benchmark. It is DX10, while 3dmark11 which has been out for a while is DX11.

 

The 6630 and 6550 on pretty much on par with eachother. But going from your current card, you would probably be amazed with the performance of the 6490M, which can play CoD:BO at 720p medium/high detail.

 

That must be what I saw -- it was really off-putting. Then I was really startled to learn that most new laptops I started looking at had only that in them. Really thinned down the choices a lot.

 

Ah... yeah, I see some checkboxes that I missed in order to see that one. Apparently my current card is old enough that it was not even tested with that.

Does newer in this case mean probably more accurate?

 

That's very interesting to know. That's only a year or so old, and I had heard pretty graphically intense. I generally only discover games after they're like 2 or 3 years old and marked down 75% on Steam. Given that, maybe the 6490 would be adequate until another 2 years when I get bored with the new laptop and start looking again at new ones.

Anyone familiar with how Civ5 works on newer cards? It sort-of works on my 3650 now, but it would be nice to be able to turn up the detail a little and not have it struggle to scroll around the map late in the game

 

Don't cheap out on the 6490 if you want any kind of life in the machine.

 

Preach. It's ridiculous to even consider it in this battle, unless it's all you can afford.

Hey what's your budget anyway?

And let's get some factual information in here. The 6550M is just a rebreand of the previous gen 5650M (kinda funny how they just reshuffled the numbers). Also, you're comparing them by average Vantage score, when the 6550M is an average of 2 notebooks, while the 6630M data is drawn from 9 different machines. Yeah, that's a flawed comparison. It's better to go max vs max (since the highest score is usually from a newer driver than the others), which gives us:

6550M: 3217
6630M: 3512

The bottom line is that you should take the current-gen 6630M, unless it's coming with a much weaker CPU than the 6550M.

 

I agree, if you're just comparing the GPU, there's no reason to get a 6550 if you can afford a 6600 or better.

 

The 6490M is good in a 600 dollar budget, if you have more than that, go with the 6550 or 6630.

 

i have a SONY VAIO SA with 6630m GPU. it runs FIFA 12 just fine on max settings. i have also overclocked it (using TRiXX) from the core/memory clocks of 485MHz/800MHz to 725MHz/950MHz (which is even higher than the clocks of 6730m) by changing the stock voltage from 0.9V to 0.905V (that is an increase of 5mV). it gives me about 23% improvement in 3DMark06 score (from ~7614 to ~9353), and the temperatures are stable in the 76C (most of the time) to 80C (max) region.