Nvidia RTX 2050 spearheads “more GeForce laptop choices”

The GeForce RTX 2050 is an Ampere GPU despite the name. MX570 and MX550 coming too.

GeForce Mobile

On Friday, Nvidia launched a trio of new laptop GPUs that it says will start to be featured in laptops starting from spring 2022. It announced the GeForce RTX 2050, MX570, and MX550 GPUs, aimed at providing “more GeForce laptop choices for gamers and creators.” It is great to get more choice, but Nvidia’s post was quite useless, with no specs discussed or performance targets hinted at.

As tech sites scrambled to cover the news ahead of the weekend, the blog post and product pages provided by Nvidia were woefully light on detail. It wasn’t until Saturday that some key questions were cleared up. For example, AnandTech Editor-in-Chief, Ryan Smith, received confirmation that both the GeForce RTX 2050 and MX570 are based on the A107 Ampere GPU (Samsung 8nm). Meanwhile, the MX550 is going to be TU117 Turing GPU based (TSMC 12nm). The RTX 2050 specs have also now been added to the official 20-series gaming laptops comparison tables on the GeForce site.

In the table below I have tabulated the specs of the new GeForce RTX 2050, MX570, and MX550 and thrown in some existing relations to contextualise their standing.

 RTX 3060
Laptop GPU
RTX 3050
Laptop GPU
RTX 2050
Laptop GPU
MX570MX550MX450
CUDA Cores3,8402,0482,048>1,024?1,024?896
ROPs483232?32?32?32
Boost Clock1,283 – 1,703MHz1,057 – 1,740MHz1,155 – 1,477MHz??1,395 – 1,575MHz
Memory Clock14Gbps GDDR614Gbps GDDR614Gbps GDDR612Gbps GDDR6?12Gbps GDDR6?10Gbps GDDR6
Memory Bus Width192-bit128-bit64-bit64-bit64-bit64-bit
VRAM6GB4GB4GB??2GB
TDP Range60 – 115W35 – 80W30 – 45W<30W?<30W?<30W
GPUGA106GA107GA107GA107TU117TU117
ArchitectureAmpereAmpereAmpereAmpereTuringTuring
Manufacturing ProcessSamsung 8nmSamsung 8nmSamsung 8nmSamsung 8nmTSMC 12nmTSMC 12nm
Launch Date01/26/202105/11/2021Spring 2022Spring 2022Spring 2022August 2020

Table compiled from Nvidia, AnandTech, and NotebookCheck data

Given its Ampere pedigree, it is quite strange how Nvidia has introduced the RTX 2050 for laptops. Of course, there is already an RTX 3050/Ti, and it traditionally releases ##40 GPUs as part of the GT line, so this is what it came up with as a compromise. You can see from the table the RTX 2050 for laptops is a boost clock/power-constrained RTX 3050 using half the bus width (64-bit).

Another interesting thing to observe is that the MX570 and MX550 are likely to have the same cores/memory and power configuration but vary only by architecture. There are reports that the MX570 will have the advantage of supporting DLSS, but this isn’t mentioned by the official product page.

GeForce Mobile

There have already been some 3DMark Timespy scores for the new mobile GPUs spotted by HXL on Twitter. The non-final test systems achieved the following scores; “RTX 2050/MX570 GPU Score ~3,300 / MX 550 GPU Score ~2,500.” For reference, the average Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile scores 3,571 points, and the average GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile scores 2,451 points, according to NotebookCheck.