NVIDIA GeForce MX550 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Mobile Comparison

# NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Mobile vs NVIDIA GeForce MX550

The data presents a stark generational divide: the RTX 4070 Mobile, built on Ada Lovelace, utterly dominates the MX550, a Turing-era entry-level part, in every benchmark where both were tested. The average benchmark score for the RTX 4070 Mobile is 27,435, placing it in the 73rd percentile of all GPUs, while the MX550's average of 26,421 lands at the 72nd percentile—a surprisingly close aggregate given the individual test results, which suggests the MX550's score benefits from a narrower benchmark set. The head-to-head results show the RTX 4070 Mobile winning both shared tests by margins of 436% and 233.8%, respectively, yet the overall percentile rankings indicate both cards sit near the middle of the global performance distribution, with the RTX 4070 Mobile just one percentile point higher.

Where Each One Wins

The RTX 4070 Mobile wins in every scenario that involves compute-heavy or graphics-intensive workloads, based on the benchmark data. In Geekbench OpenCL, it scores 109,197 against the MX550's 20,372, a 436% advantage that points to massive superiority in general-purpose GPU compute tasks like video encoding, physics simulations, or machine learning inference. Similarly, in Geekbench Vulkan, the RTX 4070 Mobile scores 108,367 versus 32,469, a 233.8% lead, indicating that any Vulkan-based game or application will run dramatically faster on the newer card. The RTX 4070 Mobile also has a full suite of Passmark tests showing strong scores: 19,587 in G3D, 8,399 in GPU compute, 763 in G2D, and DirectX 9/10/11/12 scores of 223, 116, 179, and 85, respectively. These numbers suggest it can handle modern DirectX 12 Ultimate titles (API 12_2) as well as legacy DirectX 9 workloads, making it a versatile choice for gaming and creative work.

The MX550, by contrast, has no wins in any shared benchmark—it simply was not tested in the Passmark suite, so its strengths must be inferred from its architecture and specifications rather than direct scores. With only 2 GB of memory and a 64-bit bus, it is clearly positioned for lightweight tasks like basic photo editing, office productivity, or casual 1080p gaming at low settings. Its Geekbench Vulkan score of 32,469 is respectable for an entry-level part, roughly 30% of the RTX 4070 Mobile's score, but its OpenCL score of 20,372 is just under 19% of the newer card's result. The MX550's percentile rank of 72, nearly identical to the RTX 4070 Mobile's 73, is misleading in isolation—it reflects that the MX550 competes with integrated graphics and older discrete GPUs like the AMD Radeon 860M (average score 26,401, deltaPct 0.1%) and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 (average score 26,331, deltaPct 0.3%), whereas the RTX 4070 Mobile sits alongside the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (27,425, deltaPct 0%) and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (27,565, deltaPct -0.5%).

FAQ

Q: How much faster is the RTX 4070 Mobile in OpenCL compute?

A: The RTX 4070 Mobile scores 109,197 in Geekbench OpenCL, while the MX550 scores 20,372. That is a 436% advantage, meaning the RTX 4070 Mobile is roughly 5.4 times faster in this workload.

Q: Does the MX550 support ray tracing or DLSS?

A: No. The MX550 is based on the Turing architecture with the TU117SB chip, and it has no ray tracing cores and no tensor cores listed. The RTX 4070 Mobile, on the Ada Lovelace architecture with the AD106 chip, has 36 RT cores and 144 tensor cores, enabling hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI-based features.

Q: What is the memory capacity difference?

A: The RTX 4070 Mobile comes with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, delivering 256.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The MX550 has 2 GB of GDDR6 on a 64-bit bus, providing 96.00 GB/s. The RTX 4070 Mobile has four times the capacity and nearly 2.7 times the bandwidth.

Q: Which card has a higher pixel fill rate?

A: The RTX 4070 Mobile achieves 81.36 GPixel/s, while the MX550 achieves 21.12 GPixel/s. This represents a 3.85x difference, which affects how quickly each card can fill the screen with rendered pixels, particularly at high resolutions.

Q: Are these cards comparable in power consumption?

A: The data shows the RTX 4070 Mobile has a TDP of 115 W, while the MX550 has a TDP of 25 W. The MX550 uses less than one-quarter the power, making it far more suitable for thin-and-light laptops without active cooling, whereas the RTX 4070 Mobile requires a more robust thermal solution.

Q: Why do the average benchmark scores look so close if one card is much faster?

A: The RTX 4070 Mobile has an average benchmark score of 27,435 across nine tests, while the MX550 averages 26,421 across just two tests. The MX550's average is inflated because it lacks the low-scoring Passmark DirectX tests; its two Geekbench scores are both relatively high for its class, but the overall average does not reflect its weakness in gaming-oriented workloads.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The only two benchmarks where both cards were tested are Geekbench OpenCL and Geekbench Vulkan, and the RTX 4070 Mobile wins both by overwhelming margins. In OpenCL, the RTX 4070 Mobile scores 109,197 versus 20,372 for the MX550, a delta of 436%. This is the largest performance gap in the entire comparison, and it underscores the RTX 4070 Mobile's compute capability—its 15.62 TFLOPS of FP32 performance is 5.78 times higher than the MX550's 2.703 TFLOPS, and its 144 texture mapping units versus 32, along with 48 ROPs versus 16, explain the massive throughput difference. The RTX 4070 Mobile also has 4,608 shading units against the MX550's 1,024, a 4.5x increase, which directly translates to the observed compute advantage.

In Geekbench Vulkan, the RTX 4070 Mobile scores 108,367, while the MX550 scores 32,469, a 233.8% lead. This smaller margin compared to OpenCL suggests the Vulkan API is more efficient at leveraging the MX550's limited resources, but the RTX 4070 Mobile still delivers over three times the performance. The RTX 4070 Mobile's Vulkan score is slightly lower than its OpenCL score (108,367 vs 109,197), while the MX550's Vulkan score is significantly higher than its OpenCL score (32,469 vs 20,372), indicating that the older card is better optimized for Vulkan's low-level access but still cannot close the gap. The RTX 4070 Mobile's texture rate of 244.1 GTexel/s versus 42.24 GTexel/s for the MX550, and its pixel rate of 81.36 GPixel/s versus 21.12 GPixel/s, provide the hardware foundation for these results.

Beyond the shared benchmarks, the RTX 4070 Mobile has a comprehensive Passmark profile that the MX550 lacks entirely. Its Passmark G3D score of 19,587 places it in a strong position for gaming, while the G2D score of 763 indicates solid 2D acceleration for desktop and productivity tasks. The DirectX scores—223 in DX9, 116 in DX10, 179 in DX11, and 85 in DX12—show a card that handles legacy APIs well but is optimized for modern DirectX 12, consistent with its 12_2 feature level. The MX550's absence from these tests means no direct comparison is possible, but the RTX 4070 Mobile's numbers alone suggest it is a capable gaming GPU, while the MX550's 2 GB memory and 64-bit bus would likely struggle with modern game textures.

Specification Differences

The two cards differ in nearly every measurable specification. The RTX 4070 Mobile uses the AD106 chip manufactured on a 5 nm process at TSMC, with 22,900 million transistors on a 188 mm² die, yielding a transistor density of 121.8M per mm². The MX550 uses the TU117SB chip on a 12 nm process, also at TSMC, with 4,700 million transistors on a 200 mm² die, giving a density of just 23.5M per mm². This process advantage is fundamental—the RTX 4070 Mobile packs nearly five times more transistors into a slightly smaller die, enabling its 4,608 shading units, 144 TMUs, and 48 ROPs, versus the MX550's 1,024 shading units, 32 TMUs, and 16 ROPs.

Clock speeds also differ substantially: the RTX 4070 Mobile runs at 1395 MHz base and 1695 MHz boost, while the MX550 runs at 1065 MHz base and 1320 MHz boost. Memory clocks show a similar gap, with the RTX 4070 Mobile at 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective) and the MX550 at 1500 MHz (12 Gbps effective). Memory bandwidth is 256.0 GB/s for the RTX 4070 Mobile versus 96.00 GB/s for the MX550, a 2.67x difference. The RTX 4070 Mobile has 36 RT cores and 144 tensor cores; the MX550 has none. Power consumption is 115 W versus 25 W, a 4.6x gap that reflects the performance differential. Both cards use PCIe 4.0 x8 and are listed as IGP (integrated GPU) slot width with no power connectors, but the RTX 4070 Mobile supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), while the MX550 supports only DirectX 12 (12_1). The RTX 4070 Mobile is marked as Active in production status, with a release date of 2023-01-02, while the MX550 is End-of-life, released 2021-12-16.

Architecture Differences

The architectural divide is generational. The RTX 4070 Mobile is built on Ada Lovelace, NVIDIA's latest architecture at the time of its release, featuring dedicated RT cores for ray tracing and tensor cores for AI acceleration. It has 36 RT cores and 144 tensor cores, enabling hardware-accelerated ray tracing, DLSS, and other AI-driven features that the MX550 cannot perform. The MX550 is based on Turing, which introduced RT and tensor cores in higher-end parts, but the TU117SB chip in this card has none—it is a pure rasterization design. This means the MX550 cannot accelerate ray tracing or run tensor-core workloads, limiting it to traditional shading and compute.

The process node difference is also critical: 5 nm versus 12 nm. The RTX 4070 Mobile's 5 nm process at TSMC allows for 22,900 million transistors and a density of 121.8M per mm², while the MX550's 12 nm process yields 4,700 million transistors at 23.5M per mm². This efficiency gain is why the RTX 4070 Mobile can deliver 15.62 TFLOPS of FP32 performance at 115 W, while the MX550 delivers only 2.703 TFLOPS at 25 W—the newer architecture is over 5.7 times more power-efficient per FLOP. The RTX 4070 Mobile also supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), which includes features like mesh shaders, variable rate shading, and sampler feedback; the MX550's DirectX 12 (12_1) lacks these. Both support OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.4, so API-level compatibility is similar for older workloads, but the hardware capabilities diverge sharply.

The Verdict

The data makes the choice unambiguous for any performance-sensitive workload: the RTX 4070 Mobile is the superior GPU by every measured metric. Its 436% lead in OpenCL and 233.8% lead in Vulkan over the MX550, combined with its 8 GB memory versus 2 GB, 256.0 GB/s bandwidth versus 96.00 GB/s, and 36 RT cores versus none, mean it is the only option for gaming, 3D rendering, video editing, or any GPU-accelerated compute task. The MX550's 25 W TDP and 2 GB memory make it suitable only for basic productivity, light photo editing, or legacy games at low settings—workloads where its 72nd percentile ranking shows it outperforms integrated graphics but cannot approach discrete mid-range performance.

The RTX 4070 Mobile sits in elite company, with its 27,435 average score nearly matching the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (27,425, deltaPct 0%) and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (27,565, deltaPct -0.5%), while the MX550's 26,421 average is comparable to the AMD Radeon 860M (26,401, deltaPct 0.1%) and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 (26,331, deltaPct 0.3%). This places the RTX 4070 Mobile in a performance class roughly 4% higher than the MX550's peers, despite both cards being near the 73rd percentile. For users who need a laptop GPU for serious work or gaming, the RTX 4070 Mobile is the clear choice, provided the system can handle its 115 W power draw. For users who prioritize battery life, portability, and light workloads, the MX550's 25 W TDP makes it a viable entry-level option, but the benchmark data shows it sacrifices over 80% of the RTX 4070 Mobile's compute performance to achieve that efficiency. The verdict is simple: the RTX 4070 Mobile wins on performance, features, and future-proofing; the MX550 wins only on power consumption.