NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs Intel HD Graphics P530 vs Intel HD Graphics 5000

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 128 Bit memory bus. It offers 2,560 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2060 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3050 is specified at 130 Watt and therefore better than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

Intel HD Graphics P530

The Intel HD Graphics P530 (GT2) is an integrated graphics unit, which can be found in various Xeon workstation processors of the Skylake generation. The "GT2" version of the Skylake GPU offers 24 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at up to 1050 MHz (depending on the CPU model). Due to its lack of dedicated graphics memory or eDRAM cache, the P530 has to access the main memory (2x 64bit DDR3L-1600 / DDR4-2133).

Performance

Depending on the memory configuration, the HD Graphics P530 is just slightly behind a dedicated GeForce 920M and will handle modern games (as of 2015) in low or medium settings.

Features

The revised video engine now decodes H.265/HEVC completely in hardware and thereby much more efficiently than before. Displays can be connected via DP 1.2 / eDP 1.3 (max. 3840 x 2160 @ 60 Hz), whereas HDMI is limited to the older version 1.4a (max. 3840 x 2160 @ 30 Hz). However, HDMI 2.0 can be added using a DisplayPort converter. Up to three displays can be controlled simultaneously.

Power Consumption

The HD Graphics P530 can be found in mobile quad-core Xeon processors with 45 W TDP.

Intel HD Graphics 5000

The Intel HD Graphics 5000 (GT3) is a processor graphics card included in some of the ULV Haswell processors of 2013 (e.g. Core i5-4250U). It represents the highest configuration of the integrated graphics unit (40 execution units), but lacks the additional eDRAM cache of the Iris Pro Graphics 5200. The relatively low base clock can be automatically overclocked using Turbo Boost technology. Depending on the processor model, the base and turbo clock rates may differ, resulting in varying graphics performance between CPU models.

In comparison to the HD 4000, the graphics core has been modified extensively. The GPU supports DirectX 11.1, OpenCL 1.2 and OpenGL 4.0. It also features an improved decoder for 4K videos and the fast Quick Sync encoder.

According to benchmarks in 3DMark 11, the HD Graphics 5000 is up to 50 percent faster than the previous HD 4000. In games, however, the performance advantage is significantly lower. With simultaneous load on the CPU, the low TDP of the ULV models (15 W) limits the Turbo Boost of the GPU. Although the HD 5000 features 40 Execution Units, the graphics performance is still somewhat below the HD Graphics 4600 with only 20 EUs (HD 4000: 16 EUs). Overall, the HD 5000 is thus just behind the AMD Radeon HD 7660G and at the level of a dedicated Radeon HD 7650M. Current games (as of 2013) will run fluently in low to medium-low settings.

Due to the 22nm 3D Tri-Gate production process, power consumption is relatively low. The HD Graphics 5000 is available on certain ULV dual-core Haswell models in the 15 Watt TDP range.