AMD Radeon RX 550 (Laptop) vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 vs AMD Radeon RX 540X

AMD Radeon RX 550 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 550 is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris 12 chip . It is manufactured in an improved 14 nm FinFET process at Globalfoundries or Samsung. The Polaris 12 chip (codename Lexa) is a smaller chip than the Polaris 11 and 21 and uses the improved 14nm process that allows higher clock rates than the first generation (Radeon RX 400 series). It features 640 shaders (10 CUs) and (at least in the Pavilion 15t) all cores are activated in the mobile version (where 512 are activated in the desktop RX 550).

According to the specified peak performance, the chip should be similar fast as a Radeon Pro 455 in the MacBook Pro 2016. In our tests it reaches the Radeon Pro 455 and bests the Nvidia GeForce MX150, but stays behind the GeForce GTX 1050.

The features of the Radeon RX 550 are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here.

The power envelope of the faster Radeon Pro 460 is rated at 35 Watt according to the AMD blog post. In our tests with The Witcher 3, the GPU needed in the Pavilion 15t 80 Watt and positiones itself between the much more power efficient MX150 and the GTX 1050.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the AD104 chip using the Ada Lovelace architecture. The 4070 offers 5,888 cores and 12 GB GDDR6X graphics memory with a 192 bit memory bus and clocked at 21 Gbits. The card offers a good raytracing performance thanks to the 46 dedicated raytracing cores. For AI calculations (and DLSS 3 in games), the RTX 4070 has 184 Tensor cores.

The gaming performance is well suited for 2k/QHD gaming in most demanding games, and should be able to handle 4k gaming for lesser demanding games (or with reduced settings / DLSS activated). The raw gaming performance is comparable to an older RTX 3080 or a AMD Radeon 6800 XT. Compared to the similar named mobile GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU, the desktop variant is much faster.

The AD104 chip is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC (4N with EUV) and specified with a TGP (Total Graphics Power) of 200 Watt (compared to the 450 Watt of the RTX 4090).

AMD Radeon RX 540X

The AMD Radeon RX 540X is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris 12 chip (most likely). It is manufactured in an improved 14 nm FinFET process and technically similar to the older Radeon RX 540. The only difference so far is a 4% higher theoretical peak performance (1.25 versus 1.2 TFLOPS according to AMD). Compared to Nvidia graphics cards, the gaming performance should be between the GeForce GTX 950M and GTX 960M.

The similar named Radeon 540X (without RX) offers a smaller memory bus and therefore also a slightly reduced performance.

The features of the Radeon RX 540X are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here.

The power envelope of the faster Radeon Pro 460 is rated at 35 Watt according to the AMD blog post. Due to the slower specs, the Radeon RX 540 use slightly less.