NVIDIA GeForce MX250 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU

NVIDIA GeForce MX250

The Nvidia GeForce MX250 is a dedicated entry-level mobile graphics card for laptops. It is based on the same Pascal GP108 chip as the predecessor, the GeForce MX150 / desktop GeForce GT 1030 but features increased clock speeds. As with the MX150, the MX250 is available in two versions, the normal 25 Watt version (1D13 device ID) and a low power version with 10 Watt TDP (1D25 device ID) and reduced performance (The MX150 with 10W had a 32% lower clock speed). The GDDR5 memory interface now also supports speeds up to 3.5 GHz = 7 GHz effective (up from 3 GHz).

The GP108 chip is manufactured in a 14 nm FinFET process at Samsung (LPP) 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 wont 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.

Thanks to the increased core speeds (up to +3% in Boost for the 25 Watt version, and faster memory speeds), the new MX250 should be slightly faster than the older MX150. First benchmarks indicate a 5% increase. Still modern should only run fluent in low settings (see the page of the MX150 for games and benchmarks).

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU (Codename GN21-X9) is a high-end laptop GPU. It is based on the AD104 chip as the desktop RTX 4070 Ti and use the Ada Lovelace architecture. The AD104 chip offers a maximum of 7.680 shaders (e.g., the RTX 4070 Ti Desktop) from which RTX 4080 Laptop uses 7.424 and a 192 Bit memory bus. The RTX 4080 mobile uses 12 GB GDDR6 dedicated graphics memory with a clock speed of 16 or 20 Gbps (effective). The TGP (Total Graphics Power) can be configured between 60 and 150 Watt (+ 25 Watt Dynamic Boost from the CPU) leading to different performance levels (the desktop RTX 4070 Ti uses 285 Watt for comparisons). The boost clock speed ranges from 1350 MHz (at 60 Watt TGP) up to 2280 MHz (150W). Therefore, the performance is also depending a lot on the power setting used for the RTX 4080 mobile in the laptop.

The synthetic performance of the RTX 4080 is clearly above the mobile RTX 3080 Ti in our tests and only bested by the mobile RTX 4090. In actual games we saw that even demanding games with Raytracing enabled (like F1 23) could be played in QHD and maximum settings. Less demanding games like Baldur's Gate 3 can be fluently played in 4k (see results below).

The RTX 4080 offers 232 tensor cores (4th gen) that enable DLSS 3 including frame generation for supported games. Furthermore, 58 raytracing cores (4rd gen) can be used for raytracing effects in supported games.

The AD103 chip is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC (4N process).