HP Confirms AMD Radeon 7690M Graphics for New Envy 15 and Envy 17
By Andrew on December 15, 2011

HP has finally put an end to the speculation and cleared the confusion as to what AMD graphics card comes on board the new Envy 15 and Envy 17, drum roll please…

    The Envy 15 has the AMD Radeon 7690M
    The Envy 17 has the AMD Radeon 7690M XT

Darren Gladstone of HP confirmed the final specs of the new Envy laptop graphics in his blog post here.  An AMD spokesperson also confirmed some further details about these 7600 series cards:

Envy 17 with AMD 7690M graphics

    They will support DirectX 11
    They use the 40-nm fabrication process
    They use GDDR5 128-bit memory
    Have 480 stream processors
    Support HDMI 1.41 and DisplayPort 1.2
    Offer UVD3 video decoding
    Will allow output to 3 screens

Darren also posts some gaming benchmarks with the Envy 15 using the 7690M graphics card.  For instance, playing Just Cause 2 at 1600 x 900 resolution at medium to high settings yielded a 28.8 fps.  The Envy 17 meanwhile had an impressive 42.2 fps at the same settings for Just Cause 2.  In general it seems that the 7690M XT is going to have nearly double the performance of the 7690m in the Envy 15, so if you’re really into gaming the Envy 17 is definitely the way to go.

Relative to the last generation of Envy 15 and Envy 17, the 7690M is going to outperform the previous AMD 6770m card, but it’s not going to be a huge jump forward.  Same deal with the 7690M XT which will slightly outperform the 6850m found in the previous Envy 17.  Still to be answered also is the clock speeds being used on these cards.  Bottom line, there is still some confusion in terms of what performance will be like in models that ship because Darren says he’s using a late prototype machine which could still differ somewhat from the final version that is now ready to ship to the first people that ordered the Envy 15-3XXX and Envy 17-3XXX editions last week.