Intel Iris Xe MAX Graphics vs NVIDIA GeForce MX330

Intel Iris Xe MAX Graphics

The Intel Iris Xe MAX (DG1 Low Power - LP or iDG1LPDEV) is a dedicated PCIe 4.0 mobile entry-level graphics card with 96 execution units (EUs) based on the Gen 12 architecture. Compared to the integrated Intel Iris Xe in the Tiger Lake CPUs, the Xe MAX offers 4 GB dedicated LPDDR4x graphics memory (68 GB/s versus 56 GB/s for the MX350) and higher clock speeds of 1.65 GHz (vs. 1.35 GHz). Both support DP4A DLBoost instructions to speed up AI tasks and two media engines (including AV1 decoding in hardware). Currently the GPU is only available for Tiger Lake based laptops and offers some possibilities to use the iGPU and dGPU together (using the Deep Link software framework). The GPU uses hybrid graphics to turn off the Xe MAX when not in used (display ports are routed through the iGPU, but the Xe MAX features four dedicated display ports in comparison to the Nvidia GeForce MX350).

Furthermore, Intel supports to shift TDP between the two chips for better CPU performance or balancing graphics workloads.

The gaming performance is on average slightly better than a fast Intel Iris Xe iGPU with plenty of TDP and cooling headroom. There are even some games where the iGPU is faster thanks to Deep Link sharing power and cooling. Intel targets 1080p gaming with low to medium settings with the GPU and provided examples where the MAX is on par or better than a dedicated Nvidia GeForce MX350. 

According to Intel, the GPU is mostly aimed at content creators that can make use of the additional compute units, AI (DP4a) acceleration or media encoders.

As the Iris Xe Graphics, the Xe MAX supports Variable Rate Shading, Adaptive Sync, Async Compute, DirectX 12.1, OpenGL 4.6 and OpenCL 2.

As the Tiger Lake CPUs, the Iris Xe MAX dGPU is manufactured in the modern 10nm SuperFin process at Intel. Intel aims the Max-GPU for laptops with a combined power budget of 35 Watt and up. The power consumption of the GPU alone is specified similar to the 25W of the GeForce MX350 (we guess including the graphics memory).

NVIDIA GeForce MX330

The Nvidia GeForce MX330 is a dedicated entry-level mobile graphics card for laptops. It was released in February 2020 and is basically a renamed Geforce MX250 / GeForce MX150 / desktop GeForce GT 1030. It uses the same GP108 chip as the MX250 (GP108-655-A1 e.g.). It offers the same 384 CUDA cores as the MX250 and MX150 and also the clock speeds only increased slightly (+12 MHz Boost = 0.8% for the 25 Watt version). The dedicated GDDR5 graphics memory is connected via a 64 Bit memory bus and clocked at 3500 MHz (7000 MHz effective) leading to maximal bandwidth of 56 GB/s. Again there is a 25 Watt and slower 12 Watt (low power) variant.

In Nvidia drivers the GeForce MX330 appeared with the hardware ID 1D16.

The GP108 chip is manufactured in a 16 nm FinFET process 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 won't 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.

The performance of the GeForce MX330 should be identical to the MX150 and MX250 of previous years. See our GeForce MX250 page for gaming benchmarks. Nvidia states on the product page that the MX330 offers 2x of the performance of a Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7 in an i7-1065G7 (vs 2.5x of the MX350).  Therefore, very demanding games like Red Dead Redemption 2 will not run smoothly, older and less demanding games like Fifa 20 or Farming Simulator 19 however should run fine in medium settings (see below for our benchmark results with different laptops). The low power version (see below) will be clearly slower however.

There is a low power version N17S-LP with a TGP of 12 Watt (up 2 Watt from 10 Watt of the LP MX250) and a "normal" 25 Watt N17S-G3. The performance of both variants should clearly differ. The low power variant offers relatively slow clock rates of 746 - 936 MHz (base - Turbo), where the 25 Watt G3 variant is clocked at 1531 - 1594 (similar to the MX250 and +70% boost clock versus the LP variant).