NVIDIA today introduced its first PCIe 4.0 graphics card, the GeForce MX450, for use in notebooks.
There are no specifications or products with this graphics card yet, but NVIDIA decided to quietly introduce its new MX series without press conferences or any kind of announcements. This suspiciously quiet launch may have only one purpose: to announce the graphics that will power the upcoming Tiger Lake notebooks.
GeForce MX is a mobile series with acceptable performance for multimedia and very light games. These GPUs typically have a power consumption between 15 and 25 W, much lower than the GeForce GTX or RTX series.
The most important part of the disclosure is the support of PCI Express 4.0. To date, not a single GeForce graphics card officially supports this interface standard. In fact, the only NVIDIA product that supports it is the Ampere GA100 GPU-based A100 accelerator. Meanwhile, the only mobile platform that supports PCIe 4.0 is Tiger Lake, so the MX450 may still be unique to that platform.
NVIDIA did not announce complete specifications for the MX450, but it is expected that the GPU will be equipped with the Turing TU117 processor. The only announcement was that it will be available with GDDR6 and GDDR5 memory.
This GPU was already rumored some months ago when it was codenamed N18S-G5. At the time it was thought that it could be released in two versions with different types of connectors, although this has not yet been confirmed.
However, the main performance specifications of the card and the comparison with the previous MX350 are not mentioned.
Previously the MX350 used the GP107 core and 640 stream processors of the Pascal architecture. Although the specifications seem to resemble the entry-level GTX1050 gaming monopoly of previous years, the actual gaming performance still differs from the GTX1050 due to the lower memory bit width, which is certainly sufficient for gamers who only play mainstream online games.