NVIDIA's MX series external GPUs are designed to offload important tasks from the mobile device's CPU. These types of graphics cards were traditionally used in systems that would otherwise rely on integrated graphics . As a result, they were often not powerful enough for more demanding tasks or lacked important features such as video encoding.
But now integrated GPUs have improved in quality, such as the Ryzen 6000 APUs with RDNA2 graphics or the 12th generation Intel Core Alder Lake series with Iris graphics. Some manufacturers have already announced an upgrade to the Ryzen 7000 series, further widening the gap between low-power discrete GPUs and modern iGPUs, which could jeopardize the future of NVIDIA's GeForce MX series.
The NVIDIA MX could be in danger, according to rumors
NVIDIA's GeForce MX series was designed to operate at a very low TDP. However, it has a bottleneck in the form of its 64-bit memory bus. The MX 570 GPU, which has nearly the same specifications as the RTX 2050 , offers performance similar to the Intel Arc A370M, GeForce GTX 1650, or Radeon RX 6300M. It's not a very fast GPU, but it's still faster than the Radeon 680M.
But as more details about upcoming APUs become known, Chinese portla ITHome expects the Radeon 780M GPU, which will be integrated into the soon-to-be-released Phoenix APU, to outperform the MX570.
NVIDIA is releasing its RTX 4050 graphics card, which draws as little as 35W, so the narrow gap between low-power APUs and discrete GPUs might be too narrow to accommodate another dedicated product, which would make MXs somewhat redundant. ITHome claims that this is what would cause NVIDIA to stop making MX-series mobile graphics cards, and instead focus on making 50- or 30-series models for laptops, now that they've gotten them running at acceptable low power consumption for a laptop.
