Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 96EUs vs NVIDIA GeForce MX450 vs NVIDIA GeForce MX350

Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 96EUs

NVIDIA GeForce MX450

The Nvidia GeForce MX450 (N18S-G5, N18S-G5-B, N18S-LP codename) is a dedicated entry-level mobile graphics card for laptops. It uses the same TU117 chip as the GeForce GTX 1650 but with a reduced memory bus of 64 Bit. Furthermore, the MX450 is the first mobile GPU with PCIe Gen 4 x4 support. 

Currently four different versions are available with different specifications and performance:

N18S-G5-B: GBD-128 Package, 1395 - 1575 MHz, GDDR6 5001 MHz, 28.5 W
N18S-G5: GB2E-64 Package, 1395 - 1575 MHz, GDDR6 5001 MHz, 25 W
N18S-G5: GB2E-64 Package, 1395 - 1575 MHz, GDDR5 3501 MHz, 25 W
N18S-LP: GB2E-64 Package, 720 - 930 MHz, GDDR6 5001 MHz, 12 W

Especially the LP = Low Power variant is significantly slower than the typical 25 Watt variant.

The 25 Watt GDDR6 N18S-G5 should be up to 20% faster than a GeForce GTX 1050 but of course below a GTX 1650 (Max-Q). Therefore, demanding games like Horizon Zero Dawn should run lowest settings. Less demanding games like F1 2020 can be played in medium to high settings and full HD.

The TU117 chip is manufactured in 12nm at TSMC and thanks to the relatively low power consumption (TGP specified between 12 and 28.5 W) the dGPU is also suited for thin and light laptops. Mostly it is intended as an additional graphics card for Tiger Lake-U based laptops.

NVIDIA GeForce MX350

The Nvidia GeForce MX350 is a dedicated entry-level mobile graphics card for laptops. It was released in February 2020 and is based on the same GP107 Pascal chip with 640 shaders as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 for laptops. The memory bus is cut in half to 64 bit (GDDR5).

First benchmarks however show a bit slower performance as the GTX 1050 and on par with a GTX 960M. Nvidia states on the product page that the MX350 offers 2.5x of the performance of a Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7 in an i7-1065G7 (vs 2x for the MX330). Therefore, demanding games of 2019 like The Division 2, Metro Exodus or Rage 2 will only run in lowest detail settings acceptable. Less demanding games like Fifa 20 should run fine in high settings and even 1080p. However, this is always also depending on the used processor and main memory. See below for detailed gaming benchmarks.

The GP107-670-A1 chip is manufactured in a 14 nm FinFET process at Samsung and offers a number of new features, including support for DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) as well as improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). A full list of improvements and the new Pascal desktop GPUs is available in our dedicated Pascal architecture article.

In new Nvidia drivers drivers the GeForce MX350 appeared with the hardware ID 1C94.

The power consumption in our tests was lower than the average GTX 1050 (even Max-Q) and similar to the older MX graphics cards (as the TGP of 25 Watt suggests). Therefore, the GPU is suited for thin and light laptops.