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Nvidia launches GeForce 400M series for laptops

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

While Nvidia’s flagship card for laptops, GeForce GTX 480M, was announced in May and is available in several gaming laptops, info about the rest of the 400M series was scarce. But finally, Nvidia has announced the rest of the GeForce 400M series:

  • High end: GTX 480M (already launched), GTX 470M, GTX 460M.
  • Performance and mainstream: GT 445M, GT 435M, GT 425M, GT 420M, GT 415M.
  • Entry level: Jarred at AnandTech talks about the GT 415M as the entry level, and he rejoices about its high performance compared to the current GeForce 310M, but I think the gap is too large and probably Nvidia has a 410M or similar, closer in performance to the 310M.

You can see the specs of the cards and a good analysis of them at AnandTech. All 400M series cards are based on Fermi and they support DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0, Optimus, PhysX, CUDA, DirectCompute, OpenCL, HD video decoding (H.264/VC1/MPEG2/Blu-ray) and HDMI 1.4a.

Some things I find noteworthy:

  • GeForce GT 445M comes in two versions, with very different bandwidths. We need some benchmarks to see what difference that makes in games, but the impact on performance could be quite big and the “slow” version of the GT 445M could be only a bit faster than the GT 435M. So, if you are looking at a laptop sporting the GT 445M, try to find out what version of the card does it have.
  • GTS cards are absent at this moment.

Performance-wise, Nvidia talks about the 400M series being a 40% faster than 300M parts, but we will have to wait a bit to see some benchmarks. Optimus support for high-end cards is good news, hopefully next-generation gaming laptops would have a much better battery life than current models.

We don’t know anything about ATI’s Mobility 6000 series, but desktop parts should be launched in the next few months, and ATI usually launches laptop parts not much later than desktop ones. Anyway, Nvidia has a few months of advantage, because Asus has already announced several laptops  that are available at Xotic PC: N51JQ, N73Jq, G53Jw and G73Jw.

Source: Nvidia

More information: AnandTech

Update: you have more info about 3D Vision in these cards at Legit Reviews.

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Laptop graphics card comparison: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870, 5850, 5730, 5650, 5470 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M, GTX 285M, GTX 260M, GTS 360M, GT 330M, 310M

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

My last compilation of laptop graphics card benchmarks is too old, so here you have the new version. I’m only covering the last generation of graphics card, and only the most common ones: if the graphics card you are looking for is not here, go to Notebookcheck or use Google (look for the 3DMark Vantage Performance score of the card for a quick comparison). Some remarks:

  • I know, the tables at Notebookcheck are much more informative, but can be confusing and some info is lacking. I think this presentation is more useful for many people.
  • 3DMark Vantage is a synthetic benchmark. It gives you an approximate idea of the performance of a graphics card, but actual gaming performance of a card can be quite different. It’s better to compare ATI vs ATI or Nvidia vs Nvidia, because many games are better optimized for a brand or the other.
  • Crysis benchmarks on High settings (1024×768) are included. Crysis is not a very current game, but it gives you a good idea of the ability of a card to play current games at high settings (remember that 30 fps is generally considered as smooth gameplay). But some newer games, such as Metro 2033, are more demanding (have a look at the comment about quality levels of Metro 2033 in the Yougamers review).
  • I have only included single card configurations, mainly to keep things simple, but also because the contribution of the 2nd card is very variable depending on the benchmark/game, driver version and so.
  • Bottom line: get at least a Nvidia GeForce GT 330M if you plan to play games, or a GTS 360M or faster if you are serious about gaming.

Feel free to post comments to add your experiences and other relevant information (preferably with links to the sources!).

Are you interested on laptops sold in Spain? Go to the Spanish version.

Gaming on Laptops

Graphics card 3DMark Vantage Crysis High (1024×768) Buy featured laptops
Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M 9277
 62.3 Sager NP9285
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 8292
 56.1 Sager NP8690, Alienware M17x
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 (Asus, MSI) 7467
 Asus G73JH, MSI GX740
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 (GDDR5) 6957
 MSI GX640
Nvidia GeForce GTX 285M 6498
 50.3 Sager NP8690, Sager NP8120 (SLI)
Nvidia GeForce GTS 360M (Toshiba) 5765
Toshiba Qosmio X505
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M 5686
 41.9 Alienware M15x
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 (GDDR3, Acer) 5221
 Acer Aspire 8943
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M (Asus) 5084
 39.3 Asus G60J
Nvidia GeForce GTS 360M (Asus) 4670
 Asus G51JX
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 3623
 Asus N61JQ, Asus N71JQ
Nvidia GeForce GT 335M 3191
 25.2 Asus N82JV, Alienware M11x
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 3190
 23.0 Acer Aspire 5740G
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 2947
 26.0 Dell Studio XPS 16
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 (Vaio E) 2786
 20.0
Nvidia GeForce GT 330M 2700
8292		 23.0
Nvidia GeForce GT 230M 1982
 18.7
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 1238
 13.6
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 (GDDR3) 1175
 11.9
Nvidia GeForce 310M 1131
Nvidia ION 2 696
 6.3
Intel GMA HD 285

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Fermi-based Nvidia GeForce graphics cards for laptops, leaked?

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Maybe… According to Portables4Gamers Clevo states they

will be the first to launch Nvidia’s new Fermi architecture performance VGA. With luck, we should be the only one who will hit this new level of performance.

But David at P4G has reasonable doubts about the possibility these cards (33% hotter than a GTX 285M and potentially named GeForce GTX 380M) being in fact new iterations of the old G92 core. Fake? Marketing hype? I don’t know. Have a look at the original article and judge by yourself.

By the way, April Fools’ is tomorrow, isn’t it?

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Update your laptop display drivers (either Nvidia, ATI or Intel)

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

If you play games on your laptop, you are probably interested on keeping your display drivers up to date, but depending on the brand of the graphics card it can be difficult to do. I have recently found an interesting site to dowload drivers: TousLesDrivers.com, a French site compiling lots of drivers. You can always check the support site of the manufacturer of your laptop, but these are the less-often updated. So your choices are mainly:

I downloaded Catalyst 9.12 for my Dell Studio 1537 (ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450) from TousLesDrivers.com and the installation was a breeze. No need for Mobility Modder and so. And stability has been rock solid!

If you know other sources of drivers for laptops, please share them!

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Nvidia GeForce GT 230M, GT 240M and GTS 250M benchmarks

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The Nvidia GeForce GT 230M and 240M are becoming quite popular in mainstream and multimedia laptops, while the GTS 250M is being introduced in high-end and gaming laptops. So I think it’s interesting to have a look at the available benchmarks (mainly from Notebookjournal.de and Notebookcheck).

The GT 230M and 240M perform quite similarly, giving enough performance in most games at low resolutions and medium or high settings. The GT 240M gives 10-20% more performance than the 230M. The problem is that the good ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 is faster than the GT 240M, sometimes by a good margin. Of course both are faster than the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570. The GT 230M is used in many HP Pavilion laptops, such as the dv6t Quad , dv7t Quad and dv8t (UK link).

The GTS 250M could look like a gaming card because of the GTS prefix, but in many cases its performance is way lower than that of the GTX 260M, specially at high resolutions, and in many cases it’s closer to the one of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670. The GTS 250M is often found in Core i7 laptops.

At the end of the day, the decision is going to depend a lot on pricing and the actual games you play, but generally speaking:

GTX 260M >> GTS 250M > HD 4670 > HD 4650 > GT 240M > GT 230M > GT 220M >> HD 4570


Main sources: GT 240M benchmarks at Notebookjournal.de, GTS 250M benchmarks at Notebookjournal.de

See also the benchmarks at Notebookcheck (go to the bottom of the page):

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AMD news: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series, Eyefinity (6 screens per card!) and 45 nm Turion X2 laptop processors

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

There are some interesting news about AMD/ATI products this week:

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ViDock 2: are external graphics cards finally here?

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

External graphics cards for laptops have always been interesting: they offer an easy way to upgrade the graphics card, a task that is impossible in most laptops, and they allow to combine a long battery life when traveling with a good graphical performance at home. But the fact is that the success of this devices has been very limited: products such as the Asus XG Station had limited availability and only in Australia, and others like the Magma ExpressBox have an insane pricing (729 USD the cheapest box, and without the actual graphics card!). But I have recently found an interesting alternative: the ViDock 2.

It is a box that houses a desktop graphics card, currently an ATI Radeon HD 4670 (512 MB DDR3), and it is plugged in the ExpressCard slot of the laptop. While the bandwidth of the ExpressCard 2.0 slot is narrower than that of a 16x PCIe slot, I have been told that the performance via the ExpressCard slot is only 7% lower than via the 16x PCIe slot. It seems logical, because the Radeon HD 4670 is a mainstream card that does not need as much bandwidth as high-end cards like a Radeon HD 4890 or a GeForce GTX 285. It has 2 DVI ports and 1 USB so, if you plug a USB hub in, the ViDock 2 becomes a true docking station.

Here you have the demo video:

The price of the ViDock 2 with the ATI Radeon HD 4670 de 512 MB is 309 USD at Xotic PC. What kind of performance do you get for the price? According to the official specifications, a laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (2 GHz) scores 6349 in 3DMark 06 (1280×1024), while a GeForce 9600M GT GDDR3 with a similar processor (Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 2 GHz) scores 5128.

All in all, I think it is a very interesting possibility if you have a light laptop with a weak graphics card as your only computer, because you can enjoy a long battery life when on the move and a good 3D performance at home, but if you need 3D performance on the go and you use a small laptop, you probably do not want to carry this box (in spite of not being a big one). If you have a desktop computer or a laptop with a powerful graphics card (GeForce 9700M GTS, Mobility Radeon HD 4650 or similar) the ViDock 2 is not very worthy, but the possibility of driving multiple monitors is still interesting. It can be a good investment to upgrade an older laptop: while it is relatively expensive, it is much cheaper than a new powerful laptop, if the rest of the components of the laptop are OK and you only need more 3D performance, go for it.

The ViDock 2 seems to have some compatibility problems: under Windows Vista you can only use it if the laptop has ATI graphics, because this operating system can use only single display driver at a time. There is an Nvidia solution in development.

Additional information: Xotic PC and Villagetronic.

Update: you have an interesting review at the Notebook Review forums.

Update 2: Notebookjournal has published a review. It seems that performance is not good in some games.

Update 3: ViDock 2 seems hard to find nowadays. Have a look to the do-it-yourself ViDock 2

Update 4: MSI has presented an alternative: MSI GUS.

Update 5: Villagetronic has launched a version with the ATI RAdeon HD 5670 on it: http://www.harmonicinversion.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&product_id=189&flypage=shop.flypage&pop=0&vmcchk=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=3

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ATI Radeon HD 4770: great performance/price ratio but high idle power consumption

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

ATI released today the Radeon HD 4770, world’s first graphics card built on a 40 nm manufacturing process (but the Mobility Radeon HD 4830 and 4860 were announced first). Here you have the first available reviews:

The main conclusion is that this card has an excellent performance/price ratio: with a recommended price of 109 USD its performance is higher than that of the HD 4830 and similar to that of the HD 4850.

I was personally interested on this card because I’m thinking about upgrading my HD 3450, but I see that in my case it is a bad option: my computer is on may hours, but I play games very seldom, so I’m looking for a graphics card with a very low idle power consumption and I was thinking on the HD 4670. The HD 4770, in spite of the 40 nm manufacturing process, has an idle power consumption much higher than the HD 4670. So my first option still is the HD 4670, even with a much lower performance. The power consumption of the HD 4770 under heavy load IS much lower than that of graphics cards of similar performance, so in this situation the 40 nm manufacturing process shows its efficiency.

At the moment none of my sponsors has the HD 4770 available.

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First GeForce GTX 280M benchmarks

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

The guys at Notebookcheck published the first Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M benchmarks. They conclude that it is an improvement over the 9800M GTX, but not a huge one, because it is a 55 nm version of the 9800M GTX and not a completely new chip such as the desktop GTX280.

But the guys at the Notebook Review forums do not like the results. I hope they publish their own benchmarks soon, just to compare.

And if you are in Europe, did you know that Cizmo is already offering laptops with the GTX 280M? At least in Spain it is!

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ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830 and 4860 are first 40 nm graphics cards

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

ATI just announced the laptop graphics cards Mobility Radeon HD 4830 (DDR3/GDDR3) and 4860 (GDDR5), that are the first cards in the market manufactured using a 40 nm process. This could enable using them in 15″ laptops without problems. Interestingly, in spite of belonging to the most powerful series (4800), they use a 128-bit memory bus, while the 4850 and 4870 cards use a 256-bit memory bus. I hope to find benchmarks soon!

Details: ATI

Sources: Portables4Gamers, Electronista

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