Notebookcheck Logo

NVIDIA GeForce GT 120M

The Nvidia GeForce GT 120M is a DirectX 10 graphics card for notebooks and  technically a slower clocked GeForce 130M GT with a lower current consumption. The performance should be on a level with the older 9600M GT. As the 9600M GT it features the PureVideo HD video processor (VP3) and HybridPower support.

In conjunction with the Nvidia 9100M G integrated graphics, the GT 120M supports Hybrid-SLI (only HybridPower). 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 is not supported with this card, as there would be no performance gain.

As the 130M / 9600M GT, the GT 120M features 32 stream processors that do the graphic work of the vertex- and pixel-shaders.

The performance of the GT 120M should be somewhere near the 9600M GT. Therfore, high end games like GTA 4 and Crysis wont run in high settings, but less demanding games (like Lef 4 Dead) should run fluently in high settings.

PhysX is only supported when two GeForce GT 120M are used in SLI mode (one GPU dedicated for PhysX) as the alone 120M is not powerful enough to calculate both graphics and PhysX. 

Compared to desktop graphics cards, the GT 120M is similar to the GeForce 9500GT or GT 120 (which also descend from the G96 core).  Still the desktop cards should be a bit faster.

GeForce GT 100M Series

GeForce GT 130M compare 32 @ 0.6 GHz128 Bit @ 1066 MHz
GeForce GT 120M 32 @ 0.5 GHz128 Bit @ 1000 MHz
CodenameN10P-GV1
ArchitectureG9x
Pipelines32 - unified
Core Speed500 MHz
Shader Speed1250 MHz
Memory Speed1000 MHz
Memory Bus Width128 Bit
Memory TypeGDDR2, GDDR3
Max. Amount of Memory1024 MB
Shared Memoryno
APIDirectX 10, Shader 4.0
Power Consumption23 Watt
Transistor Count314 Million
technology55 nm
FeaturesOpenGL 2.1, 7.1 Sound über HDMI (wenn vom Hersteller unterstützt), PCI-E 2.0, 600 MHz Speichertaktung bei GDDR2, 1066 MHz bei GDDR3, PureVideo HD Technologie (VP3), Hybrid SLI mit HybridPower (mit aktuellen nVidia Chipsätzen), PhysX (als zweite Grafikkarte im SLI Verbund), HDMI bis 1920x1200, Displayport theoretisch (wenn vom NB Hersteller unterstützt) bis 2560x1600
Notebook Sizemedium sized
Date of Announcement11.02.2009

Benchmarks

3DMark 03 - 3DMark 03 - Standard
min: 14290     avg: 14291     median: 14290.5 (7%)     max: 14291 Points
3DMark 06 3DMark 06 - Score Unknown Settings +
3DMark 06 - Standard 1280x768 +
Cinebench R10 Cinebench R10 Shading (32bit) +
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
* Smaller numbers mean a higher performance

For more games that might be playable and a list of all games and graphics cards visit our Gaming List

Add one or more devices and compare

In the following list you can select (and also search for) devices that should be added to the comparison. You can select more than one device.

restrict list:

show all (including archived), 2024, 2023
v1.26
log 15. 13:11:07

#0 no ids found in url (should be separated by "_") +0s ... 0s

#1 not redirecting to Ajax server +0s ... 0s

#2 did not recreate cache, as it is less than 5 days old! Created at Wed, 13 Mar 2024 05:40:26 +0100 +0.001s ... 0.001s

#3 composed specs +0.065s ... 0.066s

#4 did output specs +0s ... 0.067s

#5 start showIntegratedCPUs +0s ... 0.067s

#6 getting avg benchmarks for device 1100 +0.014s ... 0.08s

#7 got single benchmarks 1100 +0.012s ... 0.092s

#8 got avg benchmarks for devices +0s ... 0.092s

#9 min, max, avg, median took s +0.198s ... 0.29s

#10 before gaming benchmark output +0s ... 0.29s

#11 Got 0 rows for game benchmarks. +0.002s ... 0.292s

#12 return log +0.037s ... 0.329s

Gaming Performance

The following benchmarks were conducted on a Asus F50SV-A2 with a GT 120M and a P8600 CPU.

Call of Duty 5: 1366x768, max, 2xAA: 20-25 fps -> barely playable
Left 4 Dead: 1366x768, max, 2xAA: 28-30 fps -> playable

Source: NBR Test

Notebook reviews with NVIDIA GeForce GT 120M graphics card

Asus F50Sv-A2: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600, 16.00", 2.9 kg
  External Review » Asus F50Sv-A2

Please share our article, every link counts!

» Comparison of GPUs
Detailed list of all laptop GPUs sorted by class and performance.

» Benchmark List
Sort and restrict laptop GPUs based on performance in synthetic benchmarks.

» Notebook Gaming List
Playable games for each graphics card and their average FPS results.

Class 0

Arc A380

Class 1

Class 2

Radeon PRO W6600M *

Class 3

UHD Graphics 32EUs
UHD Graphics 750

Class 4

Class 5

* Approximate position of the graphics adapter