NVIDIA GeForce 940MX vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 (Ryzen 4000/5000)

NVIDIA GeForce 940MX

The Nvidia GeForce 940MX is a mid-range laptop graphics card with DirectX 12 support (FL 11_0). It has been announced in the first quarter of 2016 and is the refresh of the GeForce 940M. Compared to the older card, the new one is based on the same chip but now supports faster GDDR5. Therefore, it is similar to the Maxwell GPU in the Microsoft Surface Book but with more memory and higher clock speeds. However, most notebook vendors will use the slower DDR3 version of the 940MX that clocks only a few percent faster than the old GeForce 940M (1122 versus 1072 MHz base clock e.g.). 

For the GDDR5 version of the 940MX there appears to be also a variant with the GM107-B chip with 512 shaders instead of the 384 but lower clock speeds. The 940MX in the Acer Aspire E5-774G e.g. featured 512 shader cores (GM107) clocked at 795 - 861 MHz. The Dell Inspiron 17 7778 version however had the GM108 chip with 384 shaders clocked at 1083 - 1189 MHz.

The performance greatly depends on the used graphics memory and chip. According to our benchmarks (see below), the DDR3 version is very similar to the old 940M (due to only minor increased clock rates). The GDDR5 version however pushes ahead 20% (even 30% if paired with a fast desktop quad-core, but we lack 940M reference scores). Therefore, demanding games from 2015 should run fluently in low to medium settings and WXGA resolution. 

The TDP of the card should be rated at about 15 to 30 Watt (depending on the version, clock speeds and memory). Therefore, the GPU is best suited for laptops from 13-inch and up.

AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 (Ryzen 4000/5000)

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 is an integrated GPU for notebooks. It is used in certain Ryzen 5 APUs of the Renoir generation (Ryzen 4000 Mobile), which were launched in early 2020. The iGPU is based on the Vega architecture (5th generation GCN) and has 6 CUs (= 384 of the 512 shaders) clocked at up to 1,500 MHz. Compared to the similar Radeon RX Vega 6 in the Raven Ridge generation (Ryzen 2000 Mobile), the GPU is clocked significantly higher (1.500 versus 1.100 MHz Boost).

The performance depends on the configured TDP (12-54 W at launch), the clocks, the cooling, and the memory configuration). The GPU should benefit from fast dual-channel DDR4-3200 RAM (contrary to DDR4-2133 single-channel, which is also possible).

The Vega architecture offers some improvements over the Polaris generation and now supports DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1. More information is available in our dedicated article about the Raven Ridge architecture.

The performance is clearly faster than the old RX Vega 6 thanks to the higher clock speed and faster main memory (if used). In first synthetic benchmarks, the Vega 6 was able to reach the performance of a dedicated GeForce MX150. In games it should be somewhere between a GeForce MX230 and MX150.

Thanks to the modern 7nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD), so the graphics adapter can also be used for slim and light notebooks.