NVIDIA T500 Laptop GPU vs Intel UHD Graphics Xe G4 48EUs

The Nvidia T500 Mobile (formerly known as Quadro T500) for laptops is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). It is based on the consumer GeForce MX450 and features the same 896 cores and a 64 Bit memory bus. Currently it is available with 2 or 4 GB graphics RAM (GDDR5 or GDDR6). The TDP ranges between 18 - 25 Watt depending on the variant. As the MX450, the T500 also supports PCIe 4.0. The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. 

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal. In contrary to the faster Quadro RTX cards, the T500 does not feature raytracing and Tensor cores.

The Intel UHD Graphics Xe Graphics G4 (Tiger-Lake U GPU with 48 EUs) is a integrated graphics card in the low end Tiger-Lake U CPUs (15 Watt, e.g. Core i3 11th Gen). It is using the new Xe architecture (Gen12) and should be announced later in 2020.

The performance depends on the TDP settings of the laptop and the used cooling. First informations show that the chip can be configured at 15 and 28 Watt TDP default (as the Ice Lake-U chips) and the performance should be around a dedicated GeForce MX230 in 3DMark benchmarks. For gaming we are expecting a bit worse performance due to the missing dedicated graphics memory and driver support. Compared to the fastest Ice Lake iGPU (Iris Plus G7), the 48 EU version in an i3 should be slightly faster. Therefore, the iGPU is still only for lowest graphical settings and low resolutions in demanding games.

The Tiger Lake SoCs and therefore the integrated GPU are manufactured in the modern 10nm+ process (improved 10nm process) at Intel and therefore should offer a very good efficiency.