Announced in December of last year, the GeForce MX550 is Nvidia's upcoming entry-level graphics card for mobile devices. Hardware detective Tum_Apisak (opens in new tab) 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.
We don't know much about the GeForce MX550 other than that it supports PCIe 4.0 and incorporates GDDR6 memory. Even though the graphics card has the TU117 die at heart, it doesn't support Nvidia DLSS or ray tracing, leading us to suspect that the Tensor and RT cores are disabled. Featurewise, the GeForce MX550 supports Resizable BAR and Nvidia Optimus. However, the more recent Advanced Optimus technology is off the table.
GeForce MX550 Benchmarks
Graphics Card | Average G3D Mark | # of Samples |
---|---|---|
GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile | 6,969 | 1,765 |
GeForce MX550 | 5,014 | 1 |
Vega 8 (Ryzen 9 5900HS) | 4,968 | 9 |
Radeon RX 5500M | 3,968 | 103 |
GeForce MX450 | 3,724 | 215 |
It's important to note that the GeForce MX550 submission represents a single entry in the PassMark Software database. The results for the other graphics cards are based on the average scores from multiple samples, including stock and overclocked parts. Therefore, we recommend you take the GeForce MX550 result with a grain of salt.
In terms of a generation-over-generation uplift, the GeForce MX550 delivered up to 35% higher performance than the GeForce MX450. However, the GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile was 39% faster than the GeForce MX550.
Compared to AMD, the GeForce MX550 put up a 26% higher score than AMD's Radeon RX 5500M. Unluckily, PassMark Software didn't have any data on the Red Team's more recent Radeon RX 6000M (RDNA 2) graphics cards. However, the GeForce MX550 barely beat the Ryzen 9 5900HS Zen 3 mobile APU, which wields eight Vega compute units at 2,100 MHz. The margin was less than 1%.
The GeForce MX550 won't earn a spot on the best graphics cards for gaming. However, that's okay since Nvidia's GeForce MX series positions itself as a slight upgrade over integrated graphics. In AMD's case, the Radeon Vega graphics engine continues to be a competitive performance in the mobile space.