Die NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GE (sometimes also called only 9500M or 9500M GM) is a combination of the Nvidia GeForce 9400M (G) chipset and a dedicated NB9M entry level graphics card (GeForce 9200M GS or 9300M GS) in GeForceBoost mode.
HybridPower is a technique to choose between the integrated and dedicated graphics core, if performance or battery runtime is needed. This works only in Windows Vista. Up to now the user has to use a tool to switch between the GPUs. Later Nvidia wants to switch automatically in the drivers. GeForceBoost uses the integrated graphics core of the 9400M G and the dedicated of the NB9M (9300M GS or 9200M GS) in SLI mode to achieve better frame rates.
The performance of the 9500M GE graphic solution depends on the SLI support of the game and the type of dediacted NB9M graphics card (clock rates and memory). Dell for example claims to reach 3300 points in 3DMark06 with a 9300M GS with 256MB GDDR3 RAM (in GeForceBoost mode). This would be as fast as slow GeForce 8600M GT cards. Still the performance in actual games may be much slower.
Furthermore, the 9500M may suffer from micro stuttering (stuttering in playable regions of 30 fps) in GeforceBoost because of different frame times.
The gaming performance of the solution should be sufficient for DirectX 9 games in medium detail settings. Demanding DirectX 10 games, like Crysis will only run in low detail settings.
The power consumption of the 9500M GE depends on the Hybid SLI setting and can reach up to 25 Watt TDP for the combination (including the chipset).
The GeForce 9500M GS is a middle class graphics card from the GeForce 9000M series and the successor of the 8600M GT GPU. Benchmarks show an average 10% increase of frame rates in all games because of internal optimizations (compared to a 8600M GT with the same GPU and memory clock). According to Nvidia the card should also have a lower current consumption.
The card offers full DirectX 10 hardware acceleration, but is not fast enough to render DirectX 10 effects of demanding games, like Crysis, fluently.
The particularity of this video card are the "Unified Shader". Pixel- and vertex-shaders do not exist any more but 32 of the so called stream processors do the graphic work (which up to now pixel- and vertex shaders did).
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.