Battle of the entry-level GPUs - Nvidia GeForce MX550 & Intel Arc A350M Review

We start our performance evaluation with the popular 3DMarks and the raw DirectX performance. Both new dGPUs are pretty much on par here with small advantages for the Intel Arc A350M. The powerful Radeon 680M iGPU is a few percentage points slower and fast versions of the Xe Graphics G7 (96 EUs) are about 20% slower. Neither the MX550, nor the Arc A350M, can keep up with the old GeForce GTX 1650 or the new GeForce RTX 2050.

The OpenCL benchmarks reveal mixed results. While the Arc A350M performs really well in LuxMark, both the old GeForce MX450 as well as the new MX550 are at the bottom of the ranking. The Geekbench OpenCL test on the other hand paints a different picture where the new Arc A350M is hardly any faster than the integrated Xe Graphics G7 and also noticeably slower than the Radeon 680M. Nvidia's GeForce MX550 on the other hand performs well.

The Arc A350M is closer to the GeForce MX550 in the OpenGL benchmarks like GFXBench and sometimes even slightly faster, even though the advantage at higher resolutions is probably a result of the larger amount of VRAM. The GeForce MX550 is usually faster in the professional SPECviewperf benchmarks and the two consumer chips can even keep up with professional GPUs like the Quadro T500 in some sub-tests, but the Quadro GPUs are usually superior thanks to optimized drivers.

Most potential buyers will be particularly interested in the gaming performance and the performance of the new A350M is disappointing. The good impression from the synthetic benchmarks cannot be carried over and the dedicated A350M is even beaten by the integrated Radeon 680M in many gaming benchmarks. Forza Horizon 5 crashed repeatedly on the Samsung Galaxy Book2 with the Arc A350M during the loading screen, but we did not notice any other problems during our review period.

The GeForce MX550 on the other hand offers more gaming performance than AMD's iGPU and is also faster than the Arc A350M. The GeForce sometimes suffers a bit from the small VRAM (2 GB) with very high details and the performance advantage is smaller, but these scenarios are usually unplayable anyway.

All in all, the GeForce MX550 can handle many titles (when they are not too demanding) in 1080p and high details, whereas you will have to reduce the details (sometimes noticeably) with the Arc A350M.

The efficiency is obviously very important for mobile devices. We use our consumption data from the game Witcher 3, because the title is not very demanding for the CPU, so it should not have a big impact on the results. We also performed the measurement with an external screen, so the internal display can be eliminated for the consumption measurements.

All the devices with Intel GPUs, including the A350M, the faster A370M, or the integrated Iris Xe Graphics G7, are at the bottom of our ranking. The new GeForce MX550 performs better, despite the high TGP setting, but is still beaten by the new AMD Radeon 680M.

Our test clearly shows that the air is getting thinner for slow dedicated GPUs. The current Radeon 680M of the Ryzen 6000 generation raised the bar for integrated GPUs significantly and there is not really a good reason to invest the additional money and space on the mainboard for a dedicated GPU.

The GeForce MX550 is a small performance upgrade over the old GeForce MX450, because the basic chip design is still identical and 2 GB VRAM is not very generous, either, which is noticeable at higher resolutions and settings. However, the MX550 cannot deliver playable frame rates in these cases anyway. Compact laptops with Intel CPU can still benefit from the GeForce MX550 if you want to play a bit more since the MX550 is noticeably faster than the Iris Xe Graphics G7.

The synthetic benchmarks results of the new Intel Arc A350M are often competitive, but it seems that there has been a big focus on the performance in popular benchmarks. The actual gaming performance of the new Arc A350M even falls behind the integrated Radeon 680M in some cases. Intel definitely has to improve this situation, which is also the case for the efficiency. There might be some improvements along the road via driver updates, but right now, we cannot recommend the Arc A350M.