GeForce MX250: FPS benchmarks and laptop guide

The GeForce MX250 is the archetypal business-laptop GPU — a 10-watt Pascal chip NVIDIA slotted into mainstream office machines so the spec sheet could say "dedicated graphics." The catalog matches five business laptops to it, with benchmarks in 107 games at 1080p. This guide covers what that badge actually buys in 2026.

Where the MX250 sits in 2026

A catalog score of 23.7 ranks the chip 192nd of 341 scored mobile GPUs — the lower third. The neighborhood is the entry tier in full: the Radeon RX 550 (24.1) and Vega 11 (24.1) above, NVIDIA's own MX330 (24) alongside, and the MX150 (22.5), Radeon 540X (22.2) and Apple's M4 integrated graphics (22.1) below. The MX line was always integrated-graphics competition, not gaming silicon, and a decade of iGPU progress has settled the question — the ranking now sits entirely inside the integrated pack, a few places either way.

What the chip brings

The engineering brief was efficiency, not speed: the tiny GP108 die on a 14 nm process, 384 shader cores, 2 GB of GDDR5 on a 64-bit bus with 48 GB/s of bandwidth, a 1,582 MHz boost clock, about 0.8 TFLOPS and a 10 W thermal design. No ray tracing, no DLSS — CUDA support is the one professional carry-over, and it is genuinely useful in the business machines this chip lived in. Public benchmarks sit around 2,400 PassMark points and a 3DMark Time Spy graphics score near 1,100: numbers that say "lightly better than integrated, at idle power."

FPS in games at 1080p

The competitive staples of the 2010s run: CS:GO and Overwatch post 240 FPS at the high preset, GTA V and PUBG 140, Valorant 118, Counter-Strike 2 75, Dota 2 64 and Fortnite 55. The AAA boundary arrives immediately after: Forza Horizon 4 manages 31, the Witcher 3 21, Battlefield V 24, Diablo 4 25 and Apex Legends 20 rising to 24. Everything heavier is a slideshow — Cyberpunk 2077 at 14, Red Dead Redemption 2 at 10, God of War at 6 and Metro Exodus at 7. The honest summary: a games-of-youth machine, or an esports machine at reduced settings, and nothing more.

Laptops that carry it

The five-model roster is a business fleet: Lenovo's ThinkPad T490 and T590 ask $219–$225, HP's EliteBook 850 G7 $364, Dell's Latitude 5511 $422 and Acer's Aspire 3 $399. Roster medians make the positioning explicit: a gaming index of 16 and zero games clearing recommended settings at the median, against a portability index of 43.3 and energy efficiency of 76 — office numbers, exactly as designed. These are excellent used business machines; the GPU is a passenger.

Bottom line

The MX250 should be evaluated as part of a business laptop, not as a graphics card. In a $219 ThinkPad T490 it is a pleasant bonus — light CUDA duty, older games at modest settings, one more year of driver relevance. As a reason to buy any machine it fails: the gaming index says 16, the ranking sits inside integrated territory, and the 2 GB buffer expired years ago. Buy the T490 for the keyboard and the build; let the GPU be what it always was — the spec-sheet line that made an office laptop feel complete.