AMD Radeon 740M vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (Desktop)

AMD Radeon 740M

The AMD Radeon 740M is an integrated GPU in the Ryzen 7040 series for laptops (Phoenix, e.g. Ryzen 5 7540U). The iGPU is based on the new RDNA3 architecture and has only 4 of the 12 CUs (= 256 shaders) clocked at up to 2.5 GHz (depending on the CPU model). The 740M supports hardware raytracing, although the performance is too slow to use it in current games.

Due to the reduced core count and clock speed, the performance is clearly below the Radeon 760M and 780M.

Thanks to the modern 4nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD). The whole chip of the first two models can be configured between 15 - 30 Watt TDP.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 is an entry level graphics card for desktops based on the Pascal architecture. It uses the same GP107 chip as the GTX 1050 Ti, but with only 640 instead of 768 shaders. The chip is manufactured at Samsung in 14 nm (opposed to the 16 nm TSCM based Pascal chips of the 1060 and up). The performance and specs should be similar to the GTX 1050 laptop version, that will be released later (early 2017). Compared to the faster GTX 1050 Ti, the 1050 offers less shaders (640 instead of 768) and only 2 GB of GDDR5 (instead of the 4 GB of the 1050 Ti).

Gaming benchmarks by Nvidia state that the GTX 1050 is about 30% faster on average than the Radeon RX 460 with 2 GB VRAM. The 4 GB version of the RX 460 should be about 10% slower and the older GTX 950 should reach a similar performance level as the new GTX 1050. Therefore, the GTX 1050 should be ideal for 1080p gaming with high detail settings (but not max settings).