AMD Radeon HD 8950M vs AMD Radeon RX 7700 Comparison

The AMD Radeon RX 7700 and the AMD Radeon HD 8950M are separated by roughly twelve years of GPU development, and the recorded data reflects that gap in every category that matters. One is an active desktop part built on TSMC's 5 nm process with 16 GB of GDDR6; the other is an end-of-life MXM mobile module built on 28 nm with 2 GB of GDDR5. In the single head-to-head benchmark the database shares between them, Geekbench OpenCL, the RX 7700 scores 106028 against 13772, a difference of 669.9 percent. That figure alone frames the comparison: this is not a close contest, it is a generational rout, and the useful question is what each card still represents rather than which one to buy.

The Verdict

For any modern workload, the data points one direction. The RX 7700 wins the only shared benchmark, Geekbench OpenCL, by 669.9 percent, and it posts strong results across the rest of its recorded suite: 2865 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12, 20974 in PassMark G3D, and 1206 in PassMark G2D. It supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), the feature level that carries ray tracing support through its 40 RT cores, and Vulkan 1.4. If the goal is gaming, compute, or anything GPU-accelerated today, the RX 7700 is the pick, full stop.

The HD 8950M has no realistic case as a purchase option in the modern market. It is end-of-life, it tops out at DirectX 12 (12_0), and its Vulkan support stops at 1.2.170. Its value in the database is comparative: it illustrates what a mobile GCN 2.0 part delivered, and its percentile placement, 54 versus the RX 7700's 58, shows that percentile rankings across all GPUs can compress very different levels of performance into adjacent numbers. Anyone choosing between these two for actual use should treat the percentile gap as misleading and the head-to-head delta as the truth.

FAQ

Q: How much faster is the RX 7700 in shared benchmarks?

A: In Geekbench OpenCL, the only test recorded for both, the RX 7700 scores 106028 versus 13772, a delta of 669.9 percent. That is the largest and most decisive number in the comparison.

Q: Which GPU has more memory, and by how much?

A: The RX 7700 has 16 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus with 624.1 GB/s of bandwidth. The HD 8950M has 2 GB of GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus with 88.00 GB/s of bandwidth. The memory capacity difference is eightfold, and modern game and compute workloads will exceed 2 GB routinely.

Q: How do their compute capabilities compare?

A: The RX 7700 delivers 25.18 TFLOPS of FP32 and the same 25.18 TFLOPS for FP16 at a 1:1 rate. The HD 8950M delivers 1.651 TFLOPS of FP32, and no FP16 figure is recorded. The RX 7700 also has 40 RT cores; the HD 8950M has none listed.

Q: Which rivals does each card cluster with?

A: The RX 7700's nearest rivals are the AMD Radeon R9 370X (-0.1 percent), the AMD Radeon RX 9060 (-1 percent), the AMD Radeon Pro W5500 (1.1 percent), and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (-1.7 percent). The HD 8950M sits among the AMD Radeon RX 5500M (0.2 percent), FirePro M6100 (0.2 percent), Radeon Pro 555 (-0.2 percent), and Radeon Pro 555X (0.4 percent).

Q: Are both cards still in production?

A: No. The RX 7700 is listed as Active, released on September 17, 2025. The HD 8950M is End-of-life, released on May 13, 2013.

Q: What are the power and physical requirements?

A: The RX 7700 is a dual-slot desktop card with a 200 W TDP, two 8-pin power connectors, and a suggested 550 W PSU. The HD 8950M is an MXM module with a 100 W TDP designed for laptops, with no power connectors or PSU recommendation applicable.

Architecture Differences

The architectural divide here is stark. The RX 7700 uses the Navi 32 chip, codenamed Wheat Nas, on AMD's RDNA 3.0 architecture, part of the Navi III (RX 7000) generation. It is manufactured on TSMC's 5 nm node, packs 28,100 million transistors into a 346 mm² die, and achieves a transistor density of 81.2M per mm².

The HD 8950M uses the Saturn chip on GCN 2.0, part of the Solar System (HD 8900M) generation, manufactured on TSMC's 28 nm node with 2,080 million transistors on a 160 mm² die. Its transistor density is 13.0M per mm². In practical terms, the newer part fits more than thirteen times the transistor count into roughly twice the die area, and the density per square millimeter is over six times higher.

Feature support follows the same pattern. The RX 7700 implements DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2) with 40 dedicated RT cores and Vulkan 1.4. The HD 8950M implements DirectX 12 (12_0) with no RT cores recorded and Vulkan 1.2.170. Both support OpenGL 4.6, which is one of the very few points of parity. Neither lists tensor cores. The RX 7700 traces its lineage from Navi II toward Navi IV; the HD 8950M succeeded London and was itself succeeded by Gem System.

Specification Differences

The spec sheet diverges almost everywhere. Core configuration: 2560 shading units, 160 TMUs, and 96 ROPs on the RX 7700 versus 768 shading units, 48 TMUs, and 16 ROPs on the HD 8950M. That is over three times the shading hardware and six times the ROP count, which directly feeds the pixel and texture throughput figures: 236.1 GPixel/s and 393.4 GTexel/s against 17.20 GPixel/s and 51.60 GTexel/s.

Clocks tell the same story. The RX 7700 runs a 1900 MHz base, a 2041 MHz game clock, and a 2459 MHz boost, with memory at 19.5 Gbps effective. The HD 8950M has no base, game, or boost clock recorded at all, only memory at 5.5 Gbps effective.

The bus interface differs by generation: PCIe 4.0 x16 for the RX 7700, PCIe 3.0 x16 for the HD 8950M. Display output is fixed on the desktop card, with one HDMI 2.1a, two DisplayPort 2.1, and one USB Type-C port, while the HD 8950M's output is listed as portable device dependent. Physically, the RX 7700 measures 267 mm long, 135 mm tall, and 50 mm wide in a dual-slot form factor; the HD 8950M is an MXM module with no standalone dimensions recorded. TDP is 200 W for the desktop card and 100 W for the mobile module, but note the mobile part delivers that from a far smaller transistor budget, so the efficiency comparison at the architectural level still heavily favors the 5 nm part.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

Only one test appears in both cards' recorded results: Geekbench OpenCL. The RX 7700 scores 106028 and the HD 8950M scores 13772, giving the RX 7700 the win with a 669.9 percent delta. For scale, that is not a lead you feel in frame rates, it is a difference in what is even possible. Workloads that the HD 8950M cannot complete in reasonable time finish comfortably on the RX 7700.

The rest of the RX 7700's recorded results fill out the picture. It scores 2865 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12, 20974 in PassMark G3D, 10963 in PassMark GPU Compute, 1206 in PassMark G2D, 261 in DirectX 9, 186 in DirectX 11, 96 in DirectX 12, and 92 in DirectX 10 PassMark tests. The HD 8950M's second recorded result, Geekbench Vulkan at 12979, sits in the same territory as its OpenCL score.

Context from the rivals list sharpens the interpretation. The RX 7700's average benchmark score of 15852 places it within a percentage point or two of the Radeon R9 370X, Radeon RX 9060, Radeon Pro W5500, and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, all listed with average scores between 15679 and 16129. The HD 8950M's average of 13376 puts it in a cluster with the Radeon RX 5500M, FirePro M6100, Radeon Pro 555, and Radeon Pro 555X, all between 13321 and 13407. The two average scores are closer than the OpenCL delta suggests because averages mix different test suites, so the shared-test result is the cleaner signal.

Where Each One Wins

The RX 7700 wins everything measurable. It wins the only head-to-head test, it wins on every hardware specification in the database, and it wins on feature support, from DirectX 12 Ultimate down to Vulkan 1.4. For gaming at any modern setting, ray tracing via its 40 RT cores, GPU compute at 25.18 TFLOPS FP32, and memory-heavy workloads that need more than 2 GB, it is the only option of the two. Its 16 GB of GDDR6 with 624.1 GB/s of bandwidth removes the capacity ceiling the HD 8950M hits immediately.

The HD 8950M's wins are contextual, not performance-based. It is an MXM module with a 100 W TDP, so it fits where a dual-slot, 267 mm desktop card drawing 200 W cannot: inside a laptop. For a system that physically cannot host the RX 7700, the comparison is moot. It also represents an era of hardware that still runs OpenGL 4.6 and DirectX 12 (12_0) titles at modest settings, and its percentile placement of 54 across all GPUs in the database shows it remains mid-pack on that metric. But percentile placement is not performance parity, and the 669.9 percent OpenCL gap is the number that defines this matchup. Choose the RX 7700 for anything current; the HD 8950M belongs to legacy mobile hardware, not to a modern build.