NVIDIA GeForce MX250 vs Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640

NVIDIA GeForce MX250

The Nvidia GeForce MX250 is a dedicated entry-level mobile graphics card for laptops. It is based on the same Pascal GP108 chip as the predecessor, the GeForce MX150 / desktop GeForce GT 1030 but features increased clock speeds. As with the MX150, the MX250 is available in two versions, the normal 25 Watt version (1D13 device ID) and a low power version with 10 Watt TDP (1D25 device ID) and reduced performance (The MX150 with 10W had a 32% lower clock speed). The GDDR5 memory interface now also supports speeds up to 3.5 GHz = 7 GHz effective (up from 3 GHz).

The GP108 chip is manufactured in a 14 nm FinFET process at Samsung (LPP) and offers a number of new features, including support for DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR and improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). 4K HDR with Netflix however wont run due to the minimum 3 GB graphics memory that is required. Compared to the bigger Pascal chips, the small GP108 does not support Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) for VR and G-Sync. A full list of improvements and the new Pascal desktop GPUs is available in our dedicated Pascal architecture article.

Thanks to the increased core speeds (up to +3% in Boost for the 25 Watt version, and faster memory speeds), the new MX250 should be slightly faster than the older MX150. First benchmarks indicate a 5% increase. Still modern should only run fluent in low settings (see the page of the MX150 for games and benchmarks).

Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640

The Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 (GT3e) is a processor graphics card for Kaby Lake models announced in January 2017. As the successor to the Intel Iris Graphics 540 (Skylake), the Iris Plus Graphics 640 is used for 15-Watt ULV models and is equipped with 64 MB eDRAM cache. There should not be any big changes compared to the Iris Graphics 540.

The so called GT3e version of the Kaby Lake GPU still has 48 Execution Units (EUs), which can reach up to 1050 MHz depending on the model. Besides eDRAM cache, the Iris 640 can also access the system memory (2x 64 Bit DDR3L-1600/LPDDR3-1866/DDR4-2400) via processor interface.

Compared to the Iris Plus 650 from the 28-Watt models, the Iris 640 only has a slightly lower maximum clock as well as the lower TDP, so the utilization of the Turbo Boost potential should be worse.

Performance

The exact performance of the Iris Plus Graphics 640 depends on the CPU model, because maximum clock as well as the size of the L3 cache can differ a bit. The system memory (DDR3/DDR4) will influence the performance as well.

The fastest chips are high-clocked Core i7 models like the Core i7-7660U. Depending on the game, the Iris Plus 640 will probably be similar to the previous model somewhere between a dedicated GeForce 920M and GeForce 940M and is usually limited to low settings in modern games.

Features

The reworked video engine now fully supports hardware decoding of H.265/HEVC videos. Contrary to Skylake, however, Kaby Lake can now also decode H.265/HEVC Main 10 with a 10-bit color depth as well as Google's VP9 codec. The video output is possible via DP 1.2/eDP 1.3 (up to 3840 x 2160 @60 Hz), whereas HDMI is also supported in the older 1.4a standard. An HDMI 2.0 output can be added via converter from DisplayPort. The GPU can drive up to three displays simultaneously.

Power Consumption

The Iris Plus Graphics 640 is used for 15-Watt ULV processor and therefore thin notebooks and Ultrabooks.