NVIDIA pops out five new mobile GPUs to fill invisible gaps in its 200M series lineup
NVIDIA is filling in what it presumes to be holes in its next-generation GPU lineup, adding the 40nm G210M, GT 230M, GT 240M and GTS 250M, with GDDR3 memory ranging from 512MB to 1GB, to its existing GTX 280M, GTX 260M and GTS 160M laptop graphics cards. Apparently the new cards sport “double the performance” and “half the power consumption” over the last generation of discrete GPUs they’re replacing. The cards are SLI, HybridPower, CUDA, Windows 7 and DirectX 10.1 compatible, and all support PhysX other than the low-end G210M. Of course, with integrated graphics like the 9400M starting to obviate discrete graphics in the mid range — even including Apple’s latest low-end 15-inch MacBook Pro — we’re not sure what we’ll do with eight different GPU options, but we suppose NVIDIA’s yet-to-be-announced price sheet for these cards will make it all clear in time
Nvidia announced five new GPUs for the mobile market on Monday, which the company said rounds out its mobile GeForce lineup with up to twice the performance and half the power consumption of previous chips.
The G210M, GT 230M, GT 240M, GTS 250M and the GTS 260M will fill in the gaps between the existing GTX280M, GTX260M, and GTS160M, providing a range of Windows 7-ready graphics options for notebook PCs, according to Nvidia. All are DirectX 10.1 compatible.
Nvidia claimed it has 100 design wins for the new chips, but could not disclose any of them, as the customer products have yet to be announced.
The chipsets contain between 512MB (G210M) to 1GB (all other chipsets) of on-board GDDR3 memory and are based on a new 40-nm manufacturing process, Nvidia said.
Mobile gamers will look to the higher end of the spectrum, with the GRS260M and GTS250M providing 50 percent more power than the previous line of GPUs, according to Nvidia, as well as SLI compatibility for running multiple cards simultaneously. All are fully Windows 7 and DirectX 10.1 compatible, and every card but the G210M supports hardware accelerated physics via Nvidia’s PhysX, the technology for processing physics calculations for games and other applications on the GPU. All support HybridPower, allowing the chips to slip into a low-power mode when not needed.
In addition, the new chips support CUDA, Nvidia’s instruction set for running compute applications on top of the graphics platform. CUDA is already being taken advantage of in many multimedia applications, from DVD upscaling to H.264 video encoding and playback. The new chipsets also support Nvidia’s PureVideo HD engine, which offloads H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 processing onto the GPU, freeing up the CPU and promising more fluid playback of HD content.
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