If there is something expected by all gamers, it is cheap graphics cards, where power is not even seen as such as long as the performance is decent for the titles we are going to play. The hope in laptops is called MX550, the successor to the MX450 that has just appeared in a suite and that yields some very interesting first results, beating AMD… For now. This is the MX550 performance from NVIDIA.
The launch of a low-end graphics card is curiously more celebrated than the best that each house can offer. The prices are so skyrocketing and exorbitant that anything that comes in at a decent price is a small win. To cite a clear example: the RTX 3090 Ti is being seen above 4,000 euros and even above 5,000, crazy. Therefore, knowing that GPUs like the MX550 are a real alternative to play at least at the minimum it is a relief.
NVIDIA could have hit the nail on the head
There was a huge gap between AMD’s low-end dedicated GPU laptops and NVIDIA itself and the APUs that integrate the Ryzen HS processors. Although we do not have all the data of the new MX despite being presented as such (NVIDIA does not want to reveal its cards yet) the MX550 is going to offer a very interesting performance jump compared to its predecessor.
PassMark has been in charge of putting white on black and has shown the first data of this “new” generation input GPU. The filtering has revealed that the MX550 would achieve a much higher performance than the MX450, specifically a 35% up (5,014 points vs. 3,724 points).
This is quite impressive considering that both graphics cards have the same architecture and the same chip: TU117, although there are small improvements. The new MX550 gets PCIe 4.0, GDDR6 and would have 1024 shaders in total compared to 896 for its smaller sister, although it also runs at 250 MHz less.
NVIDIA MX550 and its performance: faster than AMD options
Comparative data with the RX 5500M shows a 26% improvement of this MX550 and surprisingly if we compare it with a Ryzen 9 5900HS we have nothing less than a brief 1% GAP in favor of the NVIDIA graphics card. Comparatively speaking by range it is much faster than the GTX 1050, but a 39% slower on average against the GTX 1650 Mobile.
So it’s right where NVIDIA wanted it to be, but it has a problem: Ryzen 6000 APUs with RDNA 2 and the new RX 6500M. This MX550 will be behind in performance, yes, but to compete with the aforementioned AMD options, the greens have the MX570 ready, which already integrates Ampère architecture at 8nm with 2048 shadersat least in theory, since NVIDIA did not reveal the features in its presentation either.
Performance estimates put it quite close to the named GTX 1650 Mobile, possibly on par with RDNA 2 AMD APUs. In both cases (MX550 and MX570) it is unknown if they integrate support for RT and DLSSalthough they will have Tensor Cores and RT Cores, we do not know at the moment if NVIDIA has deactivated these units or if it will allow them to be used, we assume that everything depends on the movements of Intel and AMD, so we will have to wait.
