NVIDIA has, as expected, released a new family of mobile graphics circuits based on the Fermi architecture. After the introduction of GeForce GTX 480M earlier this summer we now get seven new models to cover the entire performance segment with DirectX 11 functionality.
The new GeForce GTX 400M models was revealed back in August in NVIDIA’s GeFore 259.47 drivers. The models that now sees the light of days all support NVIDIA Optimus and is expected to appear in notebooks that focus on graphical performance.
| GeForce GTX 480M | GeForce GTX 470M | GeForce GTX 460M | GeForce GT 445M | GeForce GT 435M | GeForce GT 425M | GeForce GT 420M | GeForce GT 415M | |
| CUDA cores | 352 | 288 | 192 | 144 | 96 | 96 | 96 | 48 |
| GPU clock (MHz) | 425 | 535 | 675 | 590 | 650 | 560 | 500 | 500 |
| CUDA clock (MHz) | 850 | 1100 | 1350 | 1180 | 1300 | 1120 | 1000 | 1000 |
| Memory clock (MHZ) | 1200 | 1250 | 1250 | 800/1250 | 800 | 800 | 800 | 800 |
| Memory | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | DDR3/GDDR5 | DDR3 | DDR3 | DDR3 | DDR3 |
| Memory interface | 256-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit | 128/192-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| Memory bandwidth (GB/sec) | 76.8 | 60 | 60 | 25.6/60.0 | 25.6 | 25.6 | 25.6 | 25.6 |
| SLI Ready | Ja | Ja | Ja | Nej | Nej | Nej | Nej | Nej |
NVIDIA has lost ground on the mobile market since AMD moved out its mobile DirectX 11 circuits with the Mobility Radeon HD 5000 family, but with the more efficient Optimus technology, and PhysX and CUDA support the company hopes to win back the computer users. Like the desktop equivalent we expect good performance from NVIDIA’s new mobile graphics circuit, but unfortunately there are now numbers for the power consumption, a known Achilles heal of the Fermi architecture.
Stereoscopic 3D is also a trump with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400M family that supports HDMI 1.4a. You need at least GeForce GT 425M to do 3D Vision with games, but playing Blu-ray 3D and similar video formats will be no match any of the circuits.
