Description
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Max-Q is a power-efficient mobile graphics chip designed for thin-and-light gaming laptops and productivity notebooks. Launched on January 3rd, 2023, it is part of the GeForce RTX 40 Mobile family and is built on TSMC’s 5 nm process using the AD107 GPU in its GN21-X2 variant. With support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, the RTX 4050 Max-Q brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing, variable rate shading and modern rendering features to portable systems aimed at 1080p gaming and creative workloads.
The AD107 graphics processor used in the GeForce RTX 4050 Max-Q is an average-sized chip with a die area of 159 mm² and 18.9 billion transistors. Compared to fully unlocked AD107 implementations such as certain RTX 4060 Laptop configurations, NVIDIA has disabled some shading units to hit the target performance and power envelope. In this configuration, the GPU exposes 2560 shading units (CUDA cores), 80 texture mapping units and 48 ROPs, alongside 80 fourth-generation Tensor Cores for AI acceleration and 20 third-generation RT Cores for ray tracing effects in supported games and applications.
Clock speeds on the RTX 4050 Max-Q are tuned for efficiency, with a base clock of 1140 MHz and boost frequencies up to 1605 MHz depending on thermal and power conditions in the host laptop design. The GPU delivers up to 8.218 TFLOPS of FP32 compute performance, with the same throughput in FP16 at a 1:1 ratio, and theoretical pixel and texture fill rates of 77.04 GPixel/s and 128.4 GTexel/s respectively. These characteristics make it suitable for high-quality 1080p gaming and some lighter 1440p workloads when paired with DLSS and optimized settings.
NVIDIA pairs the GeForce RTX 4050 Max-Q with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory connected via a 96-bit memory interface. The memory runs at 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective), providing 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU also includes 12 MB of L2 cache and 128 KB of L1 cache per SM to help improve effective bandwidth and reduce latency for complex scenes and compute workloads in modern titles and applications. While the 6 GB VRAM capacity is clearly mobile-oriented, it is adequate for many contemporary 1080p gaming scenarios with tuned texture and quality settings.
The RTX 4050 Max-Q is designed with a very low 35 W TGP (Total Graphics Power) in the reference configuration, enabling its integration into slim, thermally constrained notebook platforms. There are no external display connectors on the chip itself, as it relies on the laptop’s built-in display outputs and mux design, and it connects to the host system via a PCI Express 4.0 x8 interface, which offers sufficient bandwidth for its performance class and mobile usage patterns.
As an Ada Lovelace-based mobile GPU, the GeForce RTX 4050 Max-Q supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.4, OpenCL 3.0 and CUDA 8.9, delivering compatibility with modern game engines and GPU-accelerated applications. It also integrates 8th-generation NVENC and 5th-generation NVDEC engines (as part of the AD107 feature set), benefiting streaming, video editing and media playback workloads on supported laptops. Overall, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Max-Q offers an attractive balance of performance and efficiency for thin-and-light gaming notebooks and creative ultrabooks focused on 1080p gaming, ray tracing with DLSS and GPU-accelerated productivity within a very constrained power budget.
