GeForce MX230: FPS benchmarks and laptop guide

The GeForce MX230 was the bottom rung of NVIDIA's 2019 MX ladder — a 256-core Pascal chip for budget everyday laptops. The catalog has benchmarked it in 58 games at 1080p, with a single matched model in the channel.

Where the MX230 sits in 2026

The catalog scores the chip at 17 — 219th of 341 scored mobile GPUs, below the table's midpoint. The neighbors frame a five-year standstill: the GTX 850M (18.2), Quadro M620 (18.4) and Radeon Vega 8 (17.6) above; the Radeon 610M (17), FirePro W5170M (17) and Iris Plus 655 (16.9) below. A 2019 chip performing level with 2014's GTX 850M and trading places with modern integrated graphics is the MX line's signature move, taken to its smallest extreme.

What the chip brings

Pascal silicon in miniature: 256 shader cores on 14 nm, 2 GB of GDDR5, a 10 W envelope and roughly 0.81 TFLOPS. The core count is the honest spec — mainstream chips of the same year carried ten times as many — and the reward for that modesty is efficiency: this die asks almost nothing of the battery. Public synthetics: PassMark 1816, Time Spy 748, Fire Strike 2468.

FPS in games at 1080p

The capped quartet tops the table as always — CS:GO and Overwatch at 240 FPS, GTA V and PUBG at 140 at the high preset — followed by a light-duty middle: Rocket League at 73, Team Fortress 2 at 69, The Sims 4 at 61, Dota 2 at 58, FIFA 20 at 56, Valorant at 55 and FIFA 19 at 53. Below that the floor arrives: Fortnite at 33, X-Plane at 33, Counter-Strike 2 at 18, The Witcher 3 at 15, Battlefield V at 20 and Resident Evil 4 Remake at 6, with Cyberpunk 2077 at 9 closing the account.

Laptops that carry it

One model name-matches: Dell's Vostro 5490, a 2019 business laptop listed at $348. Its medians read as a portable office machine — portability 68.6, energy efficiency 69.1, gaming index 16 — which is exactly what it was built to be.

Bottom line

The MX230 is the smallest dedicated GPU in this batch of the catalog, and its record says so without embarrassment: esports-classic capability, nothing more, in a $348 business chassis that was priced for its keyboard and portability rather than its graphics. Modern integrated silicon has passed it — the Vega 8 and Radeon 610M in its rank band make that explicit — so the buying logic is chassis-first, graphics-never. If the Vostro's condition and price suit an office budget, the chip is a harmless passenger; if any gaming is planned, even one rung up the MX ladder is a better place to stand.