AMD Radeon R7 M340

The AMD Radeon R7 M340 is a mobile graphics solution built on the GCN 3.0 architecture, using the Meso chip manufactured on TSMC's 28 nm process. Its benchmark data places it in the 29th percentile of all GPUs, with an average score of 5071 across Geekbench OpenCL and Vulkan tests. This positions it as an entry-level part that trades blows with older discrete and integrated solutions, though its performance ceiling is clearly limited by its memory subsystem and chip configuration.

Power and Cooling

The FACT PACK lists no TDP value for the R7 M340, which is typical for a mobile part where thermal design power is often configured by the laptop manufacturer rather than fixed by the GPU reference design. Similarly, there is no suggested PSU rating and no power connector specification, indicating that this is a chip designed to draw power from the motherboard slot rather than requiring external power inputs. The bus interface is PCIe 3.0 x8, which is narrower than the full x16 lanes used by many desktop cards, further reinforcing its low-power mobile positioning.

Without a TDP figure, the cooling requirements must be inferred from the silicon itself. The chip contains 1,550 million transistors on a 125 mm² die, yielding a transistor density of 12.4 million per square millimeter. This is a modest density for a 28 nm part, suggesting that thermal output is manageable with standard laptop cooling solutions such as heat pipes and small fans. The clock behavior — a base frequency of 943 MHz and a boost of 1021 MHz — indicates a conservative power envelope, as modern mobile GPUs often boost much higher when thermal headroom permits. The memory runs at 1000 MHz with 2 Gbps effective data rate, which is low by any standard, and the 64-bit bus width means the memory controller does not add significant power draw.

The absence of a launch MSRP and the end-of-life production status suggest that this GPU was aimed at thin-and-light notebooks where power efficiency matters more than raw performance. System integrators would have paired it with modest power delivery circuits, likely no more than a two-phase VRM for the GPU core. The 28 nm process from TSMC is not known for exceptional efficiency compared to later nodes, but the low clock speeds and narrow memory interface keep the overall board power within what a standard laptop battery and cooling solution can handle.

Ray Tracing and Feature Set

The R7 M340 has no dedicated ray tracing cores and no tensor cores, as these fields are null in the data. This is consistent with its GCN 3.0 architecture, which predates the hardware acceleration for ray tracing that appeared in later generations. Benchmark results for ray tracing workloads are not available, and the GPU would rely on compute shaders for any such effects, which is impractical at this performance level.

API support is the notable strength of this part. It supports DirectX 12 with feature level 12_0, OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.2.170. These are modern API versions that allow the GPU to run contemporary games and applications, albeit at low resolutions and settings. The Vulkan score of 5193 in Geekbench is slightly higher than the OpenCL score of 4948, indicating that the driver and hardware handle Vulkan's lower-level access reasonably well. The DirectX 12 feature level 12_0 means it supports the core features of that API, including bindless resources and asynchronous compute, though the hardware's raw throughput will bottleneck most demanding titles.

The shading unit count is 320, with 20 texture mapping units and 8 raster output units. This configuration yields a pixel rate of 8.168 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 20.42 GTexel/s. The FP32 performance is 653.4 GFLOPS, and the FP16 performance is identical at 653.4 GFLOPS with a 1:1 ratio, meaning there is no dedicated half-precision acceleration. For compute workloads, this is a very low number, but for gaming at 720p or 1080p with reduced settings, it can handle lighter titles.

Who Should Consider It

Benchmark data shows the R7 M340 scoring 4948 in Geekbench OpenCL and 5193 in Geekbench Vulkan, with an average of 5071. These scores place it in the 29th percentile of all GPUs, which is firmly in the entry-level segment. The nearest rival, the AMD Radeon RX 560, scores 5060 on average, which is only 0.2% behind the R7 M340 — a statistically negligible difference. This suggests that for the specific workloads in these benchmarks, the older mobile chip is virtually indistinguishable from a desktop RX 560, though real-world gaming would likely diverge due to memory bandwidth differences.

The 2 GB of DDR3 memory on a 64-bit bus provides only 16.00 GB/s of bandwidth. This is the most severe limitation of the GPU. For modern games, 2 GB is the minimum acceptable amount of VRAM, and the low bandwidth will cause texture streaming and high-resolution assets to stutter. The R7 M340 is suitable for esports titles like League of Legends or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 720p with low-to-medium settings. It can also handle older AAA games from the early 2010s at 720p, but anything released after 2016 will require aggressive settings reductions.

Users who primarily watch video, browse the web, or do light productivity work will find the GPU sufficient for hardware-accelerated decoding and rendering of standard desktop interfaces. The Vulkan and OpenGL support means it can run Linux desktop environments with compositing effects without issue. However, anyone expecting to play recent AAA releases or do GPU-accelerated rendering should look elsewhere, as the 29th percentile ranking indicates that 71% of all GPUs benchmarked are faster.

How It Compares

AMD Radeon RX 560: The RX 560 averages 5060 in the same benchmarks, which is 0.2% higher than the R7 M340's 5071. This is a negligible delta, effectively making them peers in synthetic OpenCL and Vulkan workloads. However, the RX 560 is a desktop card with a wider memory bus and higher clock speeds, so this parity is surprising and likely reflects the specific benchmark characteristics rather than real-world gaming equivalence.

Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200: This integrated solution scores 5042 on average, trailing the R7 M340 by 0.6%. The Iris Pro 5200 is a Haswell-era integrated GPU with embedded DRAM, and its proximity to the R7 M340 indicates that the discrete AMD part offers only a marginal advantage over a well-implemented integrated solution. For consumers, this means that buying a laptop with the R7 M340 does not guarantee a significant gaming uplift over a high-end integrated GPU from the same era.

AMD Radeon HD 8670M: The HD 8670M averages 5012, which is 1.2% behind the R7 M340. This is an older discrete mobile GPU, and the small performance gap shows that the R7 M340's architectural improvements from GCN 1.0 to GCN 3.0 do not translate into large benchmark gains at this entry level. The 1.2% delta is within run-to-run variance for most benchmarks.

NVIDIA Quadro 4000: The Quadro 4000 scores 5000 on average, 1.4% lower than the R7 M340. This is a professional workstation GPU from an older generation, and its performance in consumer-oriented OpenCL and Vulkan tests is slightly below the R7 M340. The Quadro's driver optimizations are typically for CAD and scientific workloads, so this benchmark parity does not imply equal gaming performance.

Benchmark Performance

The Geekbench OpenCL score of 4948 and Vulkan score of 5193 produce an average of 5071. The Vulkan score is 5.0% higher than the OpenCL score, which indicates that the GCN 3.0 architecture handles the Vulkan API's lower-overhead model better than the older OpenCL compute model. This is a meaningful observation for developers targeting Vulkan on low-end hardware, as the R7 M340 can extract slightly more performance from that API.

Relative to its nearest rivals, the R7 M340 leads the RX 560 by 0.2%, the Iris Pro 5200 by 0.6%, the HD 8670M by 1.2%, and the Quadro 4000 by 1.4%. These deltas are all under 2%, meaning the R7 M340 is statistically tied with all four rivals in these synthetic tests. The 29th percentile ranking confirms that the GPU sits at the bottom of the performance distribution, but the tight clustering of its rivals suggests that this segment of the market has very little differentiation in raw compute throughput.

The FP32 throughput of 653.4 GFLOPS and texture rate of 20.42 GTexel/s are the hardware limits that drive these scores. The pixel rate of 8.168 GPixel/s is particularly low, limiting fill-rate-heavy effects like high-resolution shadows and post-processing. With only 8 ROPs, the GPU cannot drive high pixel throughput, which explains why real-world gaming performance will be far below what the compute scores might suggest. The 16.00 GB/s memory bandwidth is the other bottleneck, as even low-resolution textures require more bandwidth than this to maintain smooth frame pacing.

FAQ

Q: What is the average benchmark score for the AMD Radeon R7 M340?

A: The average benchmark score is 5071, based on a Geekbench OpenCL score of 4948 and a Geekbench Vulkan score of 5193.

Q: How does the R7 M340 compare to the AMD Radeon RX 560?

A: The R7 M340 scores 0.2% higher than the RX 560, which averages 5060. This is a negligible difference in synthetic benchmarks.

Q: What is the memory configuration of this GPU?

A: It has 2 GB of DDR3 memory on a 64-bit bus, providing 16.00 GB/s of bandwidth. The memory clock is 1000 MHz with a 2 Gbps effective data rate.

Q: Does the R7 M340 support modern graphics APIs?

A: Yes, it supports DirectX 12 with feature level 12_0, OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.2.170.

Q: What is the pixel fill rate of the R7 M340?

A: The pixel rate is 8.168 GPixel/s, and the texture rate is 20.42 GTexel/s.

Q: Is the R7 M340 still in production?

A: No, the production status is listed as end-of-life, with a release date of May 4, 2015.