NVIDIA Maxwell GPU Surface Book vs NVIDIA GeForce 920M

NVIDIA Maxwell GPU Surface Book

The Nvidia Maxwell GPU is a dedicated graphics card in the Microsoft Surface Book laptop. It is based on the Maxwell GM108 chip as the Geforce 940M with 384 shaders. Instead of the DDR3 graphics memory, the Surface Book graphics card features faster GDDR5 memory (both 64 Bit though). 

Thanks to the faster graphics memory, the Surface Book Geforce is performing better than the average GeForce 940M. However, the 945M and GTX 950M are still noticeably faster. Demanding games therefore only run in low settings fluently.

More details can be found in our extensive review of the 2015 Microsoft Surface Book with the dedicated Maxwell GPU.

NVIDIA GeForce 920M

The NVIDIA GeForce 920M (sometimes also NVIDIA GeForce GT 920M) is an entry level DirectX 12 graphics card. It is based on the 28 nm Kepler architecture and uses the same GK208 chip as the GeForce GT 730M, 825M and 740M. The 384 shaders are clocked at 954 MHz, while the memory (64-bit DDR3 interface) runs at 900 MHz (1800 MHz effective).

Architecture

GK208 is based on the Kepler architecture and offers two shader blocks, called SMX, each with 192 shaders for a total of 384 shader cores. The shaders are clocked at the same speed as the rest of the chip. Furthermore, the GK208 chip has 16 TMUs and 8 ROPs on a 64-bit memory interface.

PCIe 3.0 is now supported by the mobile Kepler series and GPU Boost 2.0 mode can automatically overclock the card if the laptop cooling system allows it. This feature is available on any notebook with a graphics card from the 800M series.

Performance

The GeForce 920M offers a performance similar to the AMD Radeon R7 M260 or R7 M360 and will handle modern games (as of 2014/2015) in low settings only. For comparison, a GeForce 930M is about 20 to 30 percent faster than the 920M.

Features

The feature set of the 920M corresponds to the GT 730M and 825M. This includes support for up to 4 active displays. Furthermore, high resolution monitors of up to 3840x2160 pixels can now be connected using DisplayPort 1.2 or HDMI 1.4a if available. HD-Audio codecs, such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD, can be transmitted via bitstream mode through the HDMI port. However, as most laptops will feature Optimus, the integrated GPU will likely have direct control over the display ports and may limit the feature set available by the Nvidia Kepler cards.

The 5th generation PureVideo HD video processor (VP5) offers hardware decoding of HD videos. Common codecs such as MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4 ASP, H.264 and VC1/WMV9 are fully supported up to 4K resolutions while VC1 and MPEG-4 are supported up to 1080p. Two streams can be decoded in parallel for features such as Picture-in-Picture. Another feature is the inclusion of a dedicated video encoding engine similar to Intel QuickSync that can be accessed via the NVENCI API.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the GeForce 920M is similar to the 825M and suited for 13-inch laptops and above.