NVIDIA GeForce MX550 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU

NVIDIA GeForce MX550

The Nvidia GeForce MX550 (GN18-S5-A1, TU117-670-A1 Chip) is an entry-level mobile graphics card for laptops. It is based on the old Turing TU117 chip (as the older MX450) and uses a 64 Bit memory bus with GDDR6 graphics memory. First benchmarks show a 17% performance increase compared to the old GeForce MX450 which could indicate more shaders (1024 instead of 896). The similarly named GeForce MX570 is around 30% faster and uses the Ampere GA107 chip.

The gaming performance should be similar to the older GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and therefore demanding games will only run in low settings fluently.

The TU117 chip is manufactured on a 12nm TSMC process and should be rated at 25 Watt TGP (as the old MX450).

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU (codename GN21-X2) is a mid-range laptop GPU. It is based on the AD107 chip and uses the Ada Lovelace architecture. The RTX 4050 Laptop offers 2560 shaders and uses 6 GB GDDR6 dedicated graphics memory with a clock speed of 16 Gbps (effective) and a 96 Bit memory bus. The TGP (Total Graphics Power) can be configured between 35 and 115 Watt (+ 10-25 Watt Dynamic Boost from the CPU) leading to different performance levels. The boost clock depends on the TGP settings and ranges from 1605 MHz (35 Watt) to 2370 MHz (115 Watt). The performance therefore is also highly depending on the laptop and TDP settings.

In our benchmarks, the RTX 4050 stays slightly behind the older mobile RTX 3060 but is clearly faster than the mobile RTX 3050 Ti. Therefore, it is best suited for 1920x1080 gaming at high to ultra settings depending on the game (see benchmarks below).

The RTX 4050 offers 80 tensor cores and therefore supports DLSS 3 including frame generation that can have a big impact in supported games. The raytracing cores however will see less usage, as the RTX 4050 does not offer enough performance for high detail settings and raytracing in demanding games.

The AD107 chip is manufactured on 5nm at TSMC (4N process).