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Nvidia Product Page Reveals GeForce MX450 With PCIe 4.0 and GDDR6 Memory
As first spotted by ComputerBase, Nvidia's German division has published the product page for the GeForce MX450. More surprisingly, the entry-level mobile graphics card seems to come with support for PCIe 4.0 or so we are led to believe.
Nvidia's marketing says that the GeForce MX450 will provide improved performance over the current GeForce MX300-series for different workloads, including photo and video editing as well as gaming scenarios. The chipmaker just doesn't state how much higher performance, and it didn't provide any technical specifications either. Among the list of supported technologies, Nvidia mentioned PCIe 4.0, but we think the chipmaker might be alluding to Intel's 11th Generation Tiger Lake processors.
Laptop manufacturers love pairing Intel processors with Nvidia's GeForce MX-series graphics cards so you'll likely find the GeForce MX450 alongside some Tiger Lake processor in the foreseeable future. Perhaps, Nvidia intended to say that the GeForce MX450 works fine with processors that support PCIe 4.0 rather than stating that the graphics card actually takes advantage of the speedy interface.
Let's not forget that the GeForce MX450 is aimed at budget machines, so it doesn't make sense for it to come with PCIe 4.0 since the graphics card will probably not need that much bandwidth. Of course, supporting PCIe 4.0 on a mobile platform gives you bragging rights, but the reality of the situation is that it doesn't bring any substantial benefits and only sips unnecessary power. That's the reason why AMD left out PCIe 4.0 support on its latest Ryzen 4000-series (codename Renoir) chips.
None of Nvidia's current mainstream offerings leverage the PCIe 4.0 standard. Ampere should change that, but the GeForce MX450 is rumored to feature the TU117 die. The existing GeForce MX350 is still on Pascal so it's logical to expect its successor to land with a Turing silicon. We don't see the GeForce MX450 having PCIe 4.0, unless Nvidia equips it with an Ampere die, which is highly unlikely considering that the MX-series have historically been the last parts to jump to a new silicon platform.
The memory upgrade, on the other hand, should prove more useful for the GeForce MX450 in situations where memory bandwidth holds value. While the GeForce MX350 was stuck with GDDR5 memory, the GeForce MX450 should be able to support both GDDR5 and GDDR6 memory. The latter enables the GeForce MX450 to employ faster memory, and even if it's still constrained within a modest memory interface, the graphics card will enjoy a good boost in memory bandwidth.
Nvidia isn't fond of making a big deal out of low-end products, such as the MX-series. We're not even sure if we can even call this a launch, but for what it's worth, it shouldn't be long before the GeForce MX450 starts showing up in laptops.
