NVIDIA GeForce 710M

The NVIDIA GeForce 710M is a Fermi 2.0 architecture mobile chip built on TSMC's 28 nm process, housing 585 million transistors across a 116 mm² die. Released in early 2013 as part of the GeForce 700M generation, this end-of-life part targets entry-level portable computing, with display outputs that are portable device dependent. Its lone OpenCL benchmark score of 2419 places it at the 14th percentile of all GPUs, indicating that it operates near the bottom of the performance spectrum — a position its nearest rivals confirm with remarkably tight score clustering.

Benchmark Performance

The GeForce 710M's average benchmark score of 2419 is derived from its single Geekbench OpenCL result, and the data shows an almost perfectly flat competitive landscape around it. Against the NVIDIA GeForce GT 710M, the 710M trails by a negligible 0.1%, with the rival scoring 2422 — a difference of just 3 points that is effectively within measurement noise. This indicates that both chips deliver functionally identical compute throughput in OpenCL workloads, making any real-world distinction between them invisible in benchmark data.

The comparison with the AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE 12 GB is more striking, though not because of a large gap. The AMD part scores 2402, which means the 710M is actually 0.7% ahead of a desktop graphics card that carries a 12 GB memory configuration. This counterintuitive result suggests that the OpenCL benchmark here is not heavily memory-bound, or that the 710M's Fermi compute units punch above their weight in this specific test. It does not imply that the 710M is competitive with the RX 6750 GRE in gaming or sustained workloads — the data simply shows a 17-point advantage in this synthetic test.

Looking upward, the NVIDIA GeForce MX250 scores 2449, putting the 710M 1.2% behind that newer mobile part. The MX250 is a more modern architecture, yet the percentage delta is small enough to suggest that the 710M's raw compute efficiency, despite its age, remains in the same ballpark for this benchmark. Conversely, the NVIDIA GeForce MX150 scores 2377, and the 710M leads it by 1.8% — a 42-point margin. This places the 710M in a peculiar spot: it edges out one MX-series GPU while slightly losing to another, with all four rivals contained within a 3.0% spread (from 2377 to 2449). The percentile rank of 14 confirms that while these deltas are small, they all occur at the very low end of the GPU population, where even minor score differences can shift relative standing.

Memory Subsystem

The 710M ships with 1024 MB of DDR3 memory on a 64-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 14.40 GB/s. The memory clock runs at 900 MHz, translating to 1800 Mbps effective. This configuration is severely constrained by modern standards — a 64-bit interface halves the data path compared to mainstream 128-bit designs, and DDR3 at these speeds offers roughly a tenth of the bandwidth found in contemporary GDDR6 parts.

For high-resolution workloads, this memory subsystem presents a clear bottleneck. The pixel rate of 3.100 GPixel/s and texture rate of 12.40 GTexel/s are low in absolute terms, but the bandwidth ceiling of 14.40 GB/s means that any task requiring large framebuffer transfers — such as 1080p or higher texture streaming — will stall long before the compute units are saturated. The 1 GB capacity is also restrictive for modern game assets, which frequently exceed this allocation at medium-to-high settings. In the context of the benchmark data, the 710M's 0.7% lead over the RX 6750 GRE 12 GB suggests that this OpenCL test does not stress memory bandwidth heavily; otherwise, the AMD part's vastly larger memory pool would have produced a decisive advantage. The implication is that the 710M's compute performance is the stronger of its two pillars, while its memory subsystem would likely drag down any memory-intensive application well below what the GFLOPS figure of 297.6 suggests.

Ray Tracing and Feature Set

The 710M contains no ray tracing cores and no tensor cores — both fields are null in the data. This places it firmly in the pre-RTX era, where acceleration for ray-traced effects and AI-driven features like DLSS did not exist in hardware. The architecture is Fermi 2.0, which predates NVIDIA's dedicated RT and tensor core introductions by several years, so any ray tracing workload would have to run on the 96 shading units in a brute-force manner, with predictable performance collapse.

The API support shows a DirectX 12 capability at the 11_0 feature level, which means the hardware can enumerate under DX12 but lacks the feature set of full DX12_1 or higher implementations. OpenGL 4.6 is supported, which is respectable for a chip of this vintage and allows compatibility with modern OpenGL-based applications. Vulkan support is listed as null, so there is no data confirming Vulkan driver availability — a notable omission for a GPU from 2013, as Vulkan's predecessor (Mantle) and early Vulkan adoption came later. The absence of tensor cores also means no hardware acceleration for any AI inference or upscaling tasks, leaving the 710M reliant purely on its 297.6 GFLOPS of FP32 compute for all processing. This FP32 figure, combined with the 16 TMUs and 8 ROPs, defines a part that is geometrically and computationally minimal, suitable only for the lightest graphics workloads.

Power and Cooling

The thermal design power is a mere 15 W, making the 710M one of the lowest-power discrete GPUs ever produced. This low TDP has direct implications for cooling: no dedicated power connectors are required — the slot's power delivery is sufficient, and the field for power connectors is "None". The suggested PSU field is also null, which aligns with the expectation that this mobile chip draws its power from the laptop's existing power delivery system rather than a separate supply.

The 15 W figure means that cooling solutions can be passive or rely on minimal airflow, which is typical for an entry-level mobile GPU. The absence of a slot width dimension and length/height/width fields suggests that the physical form factor is dictated by the laptop manufacturer, not a standardized add-in board. The bus interface is PCIe 2.0 x16, which provides ample bandwidth for a chip of this compute capability — even the older PCIe 2.0 standard's per-lane throughput far exceeds what the 710M's 14.40 GB/s memory bandwidth would require. The low power envelope also implies that sustained benchmark performance will not be throttled by thermal limits in most chassis, as the 15 W dissipation is trivial to manage. However, this power efficiency does not translate to performance efficiency — the 297.6 GFLOPS at 15 W yields a compute-per-watt figure that modern parts like the MX250 (which scores 2449) easily surpass, despite the MX250's own modest power draw.

How It Compares

NVIDIA GeForce GT 710M: The 710M trails the GT 710M by 0.1% (2419 vs 2422), a margin so thin that the two parts are functionally identical in compute performance. The data suggests that the 710M and GT 710M are likely the same silicon with different marketing labels, as their scores differ by only 3 points. Any user choosing between them would see no measurable performance difference.

AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE 12 GB: The 710M leads this desktop GPU by 0.7% (2419 vs 2402) in the OpenCL benchmark. This is the most surprising comparison in the data — a 15 W mobile chip from 2013 outpacing a modern 12 GB desktop card in a compute test. The explanation lies in the benchmark's nature, not raw capability: the RX 6750 GRE's much higher memory bandwidth and core count do not translate to an OpenCL score advantage here, possibly due to driver overhead or the test's compute-heavy composition. This result should not be interpreted as the 710M being faster in any real-world scenario.

NVIDIA GeForce MX250: The 710M sits 1.2% behind the MX250 (2419 vs 2449). The MX250 is a newer architecture, but the delta is modest, indicating that for this specific OpenCL workload, the 710M's Fermi compute units remain competitive. The MX250's 30-point advantage is real but small, and it does not suggest a generational leap in compute density.

NVIDIA GeForce MX150: The 710M leads the MX150 by 1.8% (2419 vs 2377). This is the largest delta in the rival set, with the 710M holding a 42-point advantage. The MX150 is a widely used entry-level GPU, and the data shows the older 710M edging it out in OpenCL compute, which is notable given the MX150's newer architecture and presumably better driver support.

Who Should Consider It

The data paints a clear picture: the 710M is a 14th-percentile GPU, and its benchmark scores cluster within 3% of four rivals that all sit at the low end of the performance curve. For gaming, the 297.6 GFLOPS FP32 throughput and 14.40 GB/s bandwidth are insufficient for any modern title at native resolution with medium settings. The 1 GB VRAM on a 64-bit bus will cause texture thrashing even at 720p in most games released after 2015. The pixel rate of 3.100 GPixel/s limits fill-rate-bound effects like shadows and particle systems to low presets.

The 710M is viable only for legacy gaming — titles from the early 2010s or earlier — or for non-gaming tasks like video playback (assuming hardware decode support) and basic 2D desktop acceleration. The OpenCL score of 2419 suggests that light compute workloads, such as simple image filters or physics calculations in older applications, are within reach. Users targeting 1080p gaming should look at the MX250, which is only 1.2% faster but at least represents a newer driver foundation; however, even the MX250 is not a gaming part by modern standards. The 710M's 15 W TDP makes it suitable for ultra-portable laptops where battery life is paramount, but the benchmark data offers no justification for choosing it over any rival on performance grounds. Its 0.7% lead over the RX 6750 GRE 12 GB is a statistical artifact of the benchmark, not a purchasing signal.

FAQ

Q: How does the GeForce 710M perform relative to the GT 710M?

A: The 710M scores 2419 in the OpenCL benchmark, which is 0.1% lower than the GT 710M's 2422. This 3-point difference is negligible, indicating the two GPUs deliver virtually identical compute performance.

Q: Does the 710M support DirectX 12?

A: The API data lists DirectX 12 (11_0) support, meaning the hardware can run DX12 applications but only at the 11_0 feature level, which is the baseline and lacks many optional DX12 features.

Q: What is the memory bandwidth and why does it matter?

A: The 710M has 14.40 GB/s of bandwidth from 1024 MB of DDR3 on a 64-bit bus. This is a severe constraint for high-resolution textures or large framebuffers, as the low bandwidth will bottleneck data transfer before the 96 shading units are saturated.

Q: Is the 710M faster than the Radeon RX 6750 GRE 12 GB?

A: In the OpenCL benchmark, the 710M scores 2419 versus the RX 6750 GRE's 2402, a 0.7% lead. This result is specific to this synthetic test and does not reflect real-world performance, where the RX 6750 GRE's vastly larger memory and compute resources would dominate.

Q: What power connectors does the 710M require?

A: The data shows power connectors as "None", and the TDP is 15 W. This means the GPU draws all power from the PCIe slot or the laptop's internal power delivery, with no external connector needed.

Q: What is the 710M's position among all GPUs?

A: The 710M sits at the 14th percentile of all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 2419. This places it in the bottom 14% of the performance distribution, consistent with its end-of-life status and entry-level mobile positioning.