AMD Radeon RX Vega M GL / 870 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 with Max-Q design is a mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060), the 1650 integrates no Raytracing or Tensor cores. Compared to the desktop version, the mobile and Max-Q versions use all 1024 shaders of the TU117 chip. It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1650 for laptops (depending on the cooling capabilities). According to the specifications, the Max-Q variant clocks 20% slower for the base speed and 27% for the boost speed.

Beginning March 2020, the GTX 1650 Max-Q is also available with fast 4GB GDDR6 (N18P-G61).

The performance should be slightly faster than the old GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q. 

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 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

Compared to the bigger Turing chips (like the TU116 of the GTX 1660 Ti and the RTX lineup), the TU117 does not include the new NVENC encoder but an older one similar to the one used in Pascal and Volta.

Nvidia specifies a power consumption of 35 Watt TGP (Total Graphics Power) and therefore 15 Watts lower than a normal (Max-P) 1650 for laptops. Therefore, the Max-Q variant is well suited for thin and light laptops. The TU117 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.

AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 is a high-end desktop GPU that was first introduced in August of 2017. It is based on the Vega architecture (Vega 10) and equipped with fast HBM2 VRAM. When it was first introduced, it was the second fastest AMD GPU available, only bested by the RX Vega 64 that launched on the very same day. At the time of writing, both GPUs have been replaced by their respective Radeon VII successors.

The RX Vega 56 reference design features 56 CUs running at 1,138-1,474 MHz (Boost) and 8 GB of HBM2 VRAM running at 800 MHz connected via a 2,048-bit memory bus resulting in a memory bandwidth of 409.6 GB/s.

Features

Vega 10 is still produced in a 10-nm manufacturing process. The die consists of roughly 12.5 billion transistors and measures 495 mm2 in size. The newer Vega 20 chip, which AMD’s current Radeon VII is based on, features around 13.2 billion transistors. Applications have access to a total of 3,584 shaders, but the GPU lacks the dedicated Raytracing and Tensor cores that can be found on Nvidia’s latest RTX generation of GPUs.

Performance

Performance-wise, the RX Vega 56 is comparable to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, and thus best categorized as upper middle-class. Games released in 2018 and 2019 should run perfectly fine and smooth in high details on WQHD (2560 x 1440).

Power Consumption

According to AMD, the RX Vega 56’s maximum power consumption is 210 W. Given the GTX 1070’s power consumption of just 150 W, the Vega 56 cannot keep up with its direct competitor in regards to performance-per-watt ratio.