Nvidia quietly releases the GeForce MX450

An Nvidia product page has revealed the existence of a new mobile GPU - the GeForce MX450 - and it potentially has some surprising features tied to it.

Coming somewhat out of the blue, the GeForce MX450 product page doesn't offer much insight into its specs such as clock speeds or anything like that. However, the thing that stands out is that it claims to have PCI Express 4.0 support, something that would be unusual for such an entry-level mobile graphics card. Granted, we can't guarantee that the MX450 is an entry-level card but it'd make sense given the usual standard of MX cards. 

The confusing thing is how the GeForce MX450 uses PCIe 4.0 or whether it simply works alongside processors that support it - the latter being far more likely with the thinking being a pairing with Intel's Tiger Lake processors making sense. There's also something else unusual about the GeForce MX450's specs. It states it supports GDDR6 as well as GDDR5, something that's only supported on Turing based cards and later. 

Nvidia's product page is keen to stress that the GeForce MX450 will provide improved performance over its current MX300 series for everything from photo and video editing to gaming, but doesn't state exactly how improved that performance is, and, of course, there's no sign of technical specifications either. 

It's all a bit vague, essentially. Nvidia rarely makes a big deal out of its budget products so it's obviously not too fussed about a 'full' launch but it does leave questions about whether this is part of something bigger or not thanks to that all important PCIe 4.0 support (unless it's been poorly explained). 

We can't see PCIe 4.0 support being particularly useful on any systems where the MX450 is likely to be attached to (other than bragging rights) but the existence of GDDR6 should be useful. It should mean a decent boost in memory bandwidth even on low-end laptops that are likely to utilise such a card. For now, we'll have to wait and see what laptops actually use the GeForce MX450. 

The GeForce MX450 is expected to debut in October via various Nvidia laptop OEM partners.