AMD shows Strix Halo flagship APU beating NVIDIA RTX 4070 mobile GPU by up to 70% in PC games

AMD's Strix Halo (Ryzen AI Max+ 300) chips were shown off at CES 2025 - having been a huge talking point on the rumor mill for ages before that - and Team Red is now stoking more hype for these APUs, claiming that they outgun an NVIDIA RTX 4070 mobile GPU.

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AMD's benchmarks showing the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 outgunning the RTX 4070 laptop graphics card (Image Credit: AMD / Tom's Hardware)

Yes, that's a big claim, and as you might expect, there are caveats here - notably that these are AMD's own benchmarks.

We'll come back to that point, but the benchmarks show the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 flagship 16-core APU beating the RTX 4070 laptop GPU by 68% in Borderlands 3, which is one of the more eye-opening results presented by AMD.

There's another big victory for the Strix Halo chip in Hitman 3, where the AMD APU is 50% faster than the laptop that has NVIDIA's RTX 4070 inside. Baldur's Gate 3 also represents a just over 50% win for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395.

Many of the other results presented are a lot closer, but the AMD CPU still wins out in all of them (albeit just by a single FPS in Counter-Strike 2). This is at 1080p resolution with high graphics settings, we should add, and no upscaling or frame generation trickery is used.

Consider the caveats

Impressive stuff, right? Well, yes, it must be said, it is - but let's return to those mentioned caveats. As ever with marketing, the selected benchmarks are picked carefully to highlight the firm's own product in its best light, and furthermore, a key point here is the configuration of the RTX 4070 in question.

As Tom's Hardware, which picked up on the slide from AMD, points out, the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 that the RTX 4070 is being run in has the GPU tamed to 65W. In a laptop where it's allowed to fully flex its 115W muscles, the RTX 4070 is obviously going to be quite a bit more powerful.

If you want a slim and light gaming laptop, though, the Strix Halo APU is going to provide quite the performance, there's no doubting that. Just as the rumor mill has been telling us for a long, long time now.

The question is: how much will you need to fork out for a laptop with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU as its beating, processing heart? We suspect any such portable is going to weigh in with a seriously expensive price tag, but exactly where pricing may fall remains to be seen. Fingers crossed it's less costly than we're imagining.