The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Review: Unleashing Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 Into Notebooks

Graphics Performance

Moving on to gaming performance, AMD has upgraded their integrated graphics within Strix Point to the RDNA 3.5 architecture. RDNA 3.5 improves things over RDNA 3 within Phoenix and Hawk Point in multiple areas. One thing RDNA 3.5 does is greatly increase the GPU's capacity to execute complicated graphics operations more effectively by optimizing key things such as texture sampling and interpolation. Upgrading the memory management in RDNA 3.5 also allows for better overall power optimization and data handling to address major GPU performance issues.

Screenshot of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with Radeon 890M in GPU-Z

All of the improvements and upgrades over RDNA 3 should theoretically translate into better real-world gaming performance. Generally, any form of mobile SoC doesn't quite bring the power or graphics compute to the same level as discrete graphics, which have more die area to play with, a higher transistor budget at the manufacturing level, and more power.

As the new AMD Radeon 890M graphics is the direct successor to the Radeon 780M, it does have an obvious competitor in the previous Phoenix and Hawk Point mobile SoCs. Until Intel launches its upcoming Lunar Lake mobile SoC, the other competitor is Intel's current Meteor Lake-based Arc Xe LPG integrated graphics. Another contender is AMD's own RDNA 3.5 sibling to the Radeon 890M in the Ryzen AI 9 HX pairing, which is the Radeon 880M and is found in the Ryzen AI 9 365. The main difference between the Radeon 890M and the 880M is in the number of graphic cores or compute units (CUs). The Radeon 890M features 16 x CUs, while the Radeon 880M comes with 12 x CUs.

As integrated graphics get their memory from the primary pool of DRAM installed, slower system memory can be hindered by bandwidth. AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series allows for both DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-7500, which is what the ASUS Zenbook S 16 we're testing uses.

For this review, we will focus on gaming performance at 1080p, which is the most commonly used gaming resolution according to the latest Steam survey. Given that these are mobile chips, we've opted for middle-of-the-road settings using the Medium preset. Despite the advancements in integrated graphics, they still lack the horsepower of discrete graphics.

Gaming Performance @ 1080p Medium Settings

Looking at the performance of the Radeon 890M within the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, we can see that the combination of Zen 5/Zen 5c cores and the latest RDNA 3.5 graphics performs consistently well at 1080p. Given the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has a higher core count with 12C/24T (4 x Z5 + 8 x Z5c) compared to the Ryzen 9 7940HS (8C/16T), the latest Soc also has a higher number of graphics compute units (16 CUs vs. 12 CUs). On top of that, you also have to factor in the jump in CPU architecture to Zen 5 over Zen 4; the latest SoC certainly does have an advantage.

In Company of Heroes 3 at medium settings, this game can simultaneously be very taxing on the CPU cores and graphics. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with the Radeon 890M graphics is around 23% faster than the Ryzen 9 7940HS/Radeon 780M, although to make things a level playing field, we are testing the 7940HS at 35 W. 

We also see good gains over the Ryzen 9 7940HS and Intel's Core Ultra 7 155H, which is a 6P+8E/22T chip with their Arc Xe integrated graphics that has 8 x CUs in Cyberpunk 2022 and F1 2023, but we are also seeing an uptick of 38% compared to the Core Ultra 7 155H in Returnal; for contrast, it beats the Ryzen 7940HS by around 57%.

Overall, AMD's latest RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture and the Zen 5 pairing certainly improve integrated graphics performance. This is a good thing, although integrated graphics are still not quite there when it comes to achieving a consistent 1080p/60fps in demanding titles. Games such as MOBAs, including League of Legends and DOTA 2, and other less demanding games will certainly play well on this iGPU.