GeForce MX450: FPS benchmarks and laptop guide

The GeForce MX450 was NVIDIA's 2020 answer to a simple question: can a thin business laptop carry a real GPU? Benchmark across 16 games at 1080p on the high preset, with 46 catalog models carrying it — this guide covers the Turing card that quietly upgraded a generation of office machines.

Where the GeForce MX450 sits in 2026

A catalog score of 44.7 ranks it 142nd of 341 — the exact middle of the table. The neighbors frame its identity: the Radeon Pro 5500M (45.4) and GTX 1060 Max-Q pair (45.2/44.6) above, the GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q (44.1) and Quadro T2000 Max-Q (44) below. The MX450 slots precisely at the boundary between aged mid-range gaming cards and modern thin-and-light graphics — which was always its design brief.

What the chip brings

Turing architecture (TU117S) on 12nm: 896 CUDA cores boosting to 1575MHz, 2GB of GDDR5 or GDDR6 on a 64-bit bus with 80GB/s, a 25W envelope and 3.2 teraflops peak. Public benchmarks: PassMark 3714, Time Spy 1900, Fire Strike 4725, with strong compute scores of 27321 (Vulkan) and 28541 (OpenCL). The 2GB buffer is the chip's defining constraint in 2026 — everything else about it still holds up.

FPS in games at 1080p

At the high preset the esports tier is genuinely comfortable: Counter-Strike 2 at 88, DOTA 2 at 88, Valorant at 85, Fortnite at 61, Battlefield 5 at 49. The mid tier holds playable: Forza Horizon 4 at 35, Far Cry 5 and Forza Horizon 5 at 34, The Witcher 3 at 33, Cyberpunk 2077 at 32. The heavy end fades: the Resident Evil 4 remake at 16 and Metro Exodus at 10 fps. A settings pass in texture-heavy titles covers the 2GB buffer's limits.

Laptops that carry it

The 46-model roster is business-and-ultrabook territory, twelve shown: Dell Latitude 5530 at $475, ASUS ZenBook 14X OLED at $840, HP 250 G9 at $780, the 2021 Latitude 5521/5421 and Vostro 5510/5510 cluster at $403-438, Inspiron 13 5310 at $331, ThinkPad L14/L15 Gen 2 at $345-447, and the ZenBook Duo 14 and ZenBook 14 UM425 at $739. Fleet medians: best-CPU 70, gaming index 44, portability 65.9 — modern processors, thin chassis, modest graphics. Exactly the MX450's intended habitat.

Bottom line

The MX450 is the pragmatic thin-machine GPU: it makes a business ultrabook esports-capable without wrecking its battery or thickness. In 2026 it remains a sensible floor for used-business-laptop shoppers who want occasional light gaming — CS2 and Valorant at high settings are real capabilities, not marketing. The 2GB buffer is the honest ceiling: fine at 1080p esports, tight in modern open-world titles.