NVIDIA GeForce GTS 260M

The Nividia GeForce GTS 260M is a DirectX 10.1 graphics adapter for notebooks based on the 40nm GT215 core. It features 96 shader cores as the 9800M GT, but the memory bus is only 128 bit wide. To compensate this, the GTS 260M supports GDDR5. Technically it is a higher clocked GeForce GTS 250M but with a much higher power consumption (TDP) of 38 Watt.

The core of the GTS260M is internally called GT215 and according to Nvidia based on the current high-end desktop architecture (GTX 200 series). Furthermore, Nvidia has improved the micro-architecture for further power saving and performance increases. Therefore, the performance per shader unit of the GeForce card should be slightly better compared to the previous generation.

As the GeForce 9800M GT, the laptop graphics card GeForce GTS 260M features 96 stream processors that do the work of the former dedicated pixel- and vertex-shaders. The unified shaders of Nvidia are 1-dimensional (AMD has 5-dimensional shaders which leads to the higher number of shaders).

The GeForce GPU also supports CUDA, DirectX Compute, OpenCL, and PhysX to use the shaders for other tasks than rendering images (like encoding videos, calculating the physics of a game or mathematical tasks). For these special tasks, the GPU can be noticeably faster than current CPUs.

The mobile graphics card has a built in video decoder called PureVideo HD with VP4. The Video Processor 4 (VP4) supports the full decoding of H.264, VC-1, and now also MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. DivX or XviD). MPEG-1 still wont be supported, but the decoding of this codec is quite trivial on a CPU.

In conjunction with a chipset from Nvidia with integrated graphics (e.g. 9400M), the GTS 260M supports Hybrid-SLI (HybridPower and GeForceBoost). 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 (and possibly Windows 7). 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 by the GTS 260M because the SLI combination would not perform better.

The performance of the middle class - high end GPU GeForce GTS 260M should be slightly above the GTS 250M because of the higher clock speed. Demanding DirectX 10 games like Crysis should run fluently in medium to high details. Older or less demanding games should run in high detail settings and high resolutions.

Depending on the the used type of graphics memory (GDDR5, GDDR3) the performance may differ.

The power consumption of the mobile graphics card is with 37 Watt TDP is significantly higher than the GTS 250M one. (27 Watt). Furthermore, according to Nvidia, the new improved core does only need half of the power in Idle mode (compared to the previous generation).

As far as we know, the GTS 260M was never used in a laptop and later refreshed as the Nvidia GeForce GTS 360M with a slightly higher core speed. 

Benchmarks

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 detailled information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.

:: No reviews found for this graphics card.