GeForce MX550 Edges Over Ryzen 9 APU In New Benchmark

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GeForce MX550
GeForce MX550 (Image credit: Nvidia)

Announced in December of last year, the GeForce MX550 is Nvidia's upcoming entry-level graphics card for mobile devices. Hardware detective Tum_Apisak has unearthed the first benchmark of the GeForce MX550, showing its potential performance compared to the existing market competition.

Despite the official announcement, a lot of mystery still surrounds the GeForce MX550. From what Nvidia has confirmed so far, the GeForce MX550 still leverages the prior Turing architecture. Surprisingly, the GeForce MX550 utilizes the TU117 silicon, the same die inside the GeForce MX450. For reference, the GeForce MX450's performance is somewhere up the GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile's ballpark.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
News Editor, RAM Reviewer & SSD Technician

Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • King_V
    "Edges" out is right. That's less than a 1% difference. As it says, only one sample.

    But this performance difference, if the MX550 score valid across multiple samples, represents a difference well within margin of error for performance comparisons, no?
    Reply
  • foolproof
    The Mx450 was a great card but really expensive and difficult to find in the US. Whenever I googled MX450 laptops I'd end up on Amazon India or other Indian shops. This card will probably face the same issue
    Reply
  • artk2219
    King_V said:
    "Edges" out is right. That's less than a 1% difference. As it says, only one sample.

    But this performance difference, if the MX550 score valid across multiple samples, represents a difference well within margin of error for performance comparisons, no?

    Yep. Margins of error are usually within 2 - 3%, with any notable difference really needing to be 10% or above in most cases. Honestly id rather have the APU and the increased battery life that comes with it, its not enough of a difference to be worth it as a discrete GPU.
    Reply
  • Umfriend
    And for the umpteenth time things like this make me wonder what a quad-channel APU would do for GFX performance. I realise the mem-controller and MB (due to traces) would become more expensive but what you would save is dGPU real estate to, you know, add like a 4th M.2 slot in a 14"chassis. A storage and mempory bandwith monster, relatively speaking.

    Edit: I also wonder whether the increased cost of making a quad-channel APU is higher than the cost of including an MX550.
    Reply
  • artk2219
    Umfriend said:
    And for the umpteenth time things like this make me wonder what a quad-channel APU would do for GFX performance. I realise the mem-controller and MB (due to traces) would become more expensive but what you would save is dGPU real estate to, you know, add like a 4th M.2 slot in a 14"chassis. A storage and mempory bandwith monster, relatively speaking.

    Edit: I also wonder whether the increased cost of making a quad-channel APU is higher than the cost of including an MX550.

    AMD could totally make a chip like that, design the ecosystem to go with it, and then have the OEM's give it a hard pass, because they're trying to sell as many cheap PC's as possible, which an increased cost to produce does not Jive with. Hell, AMD has a hard enough time getting OEM's to produce products with their current chips as is, personally I think that would be an excellent idea, and it will likely not see the light of day for the reason above.
    Reply
  • Umfriend
    artk2219 said:
    AMD could totally make a chip like that, design the ecosystem to go with it, and then have the OEM's give it a hard pass, because they're trying to sell as many cheap PC's as possible, which an increased cost to produce does not Jive with. Hell, AMD has a hard enough time getting OEM's to produce products with their current chips as is, personally I think that would be an excellent idea, and it will likely not see the light of day for the reason above.
    You are probably right. On the other hand, I would not be surprised if it would outperform APU+low end dGPU solution and end up cheaper because. well,. you don;t need a dGPU and accompanying memory. If only I were a billionaire, I'd make it happen (although, if I were a billionaire, I'd probably be doing other things entirely ;)|).
    Reply