NVIDIA MX250 and MX230 Mobile GPU Performance Clarified

Faster than NVIDIA MX150 and MX130 After All

NVIDIA officially (albeit quietly) launched the MX250 and MX230 mobile GPUs last week. This provides additional low-power GPU options for gaming laptops. However, the official specifications were not exactly quite clear on what these new GPUs bring.

In fact, just going by the numbers the company provided, it looked like both new GPUs performed on par or worse than prior MX150 and MX130 GPUs.

Now that laptops with these new GPUs are finally coming out, we can finally get a clearer picture of what they have to offer.

How Well Does the MX250/MX230 Perform Compared to the MX150/MX130?

NVIDIA’s website lists the performance metric based on Intel’s UHD620 IGP as the base (1.0), with NVIDIA GPUs as multiples of this.

Official MX230 GPU Specs from NVIDIA

Official MX250 GPU Specs from NVIDIA

Official MX150 GPU Specs from NVIDIA

Although the GPU company is clear about using an Intel Whiskey Lake i5-8265U IGP for the new MX250/MX230, they did not specify which CPU they used for the MX150/MX130. According to Notebookcheck, the spec sheet actually uses the UHD620 IGP from a Kaby Lake Core i5-7200U. So the new GPUs are definitely (slightly) faster.

While both the MX250 and MX150 use the same Pascal architecture, the MX250’s memory interface supports higher speeds. Specifically running up to 3.5GHz vs just 3GHz with the MX150. So it is not just a rebadged MX150 as initially thought. Both the MX230 and MX150 also support Vulkan 1.1, OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 1.2 APIs.