NVIDIA GeForce GTS 360M

As the GeForce 9800M GT, the laptop graphics card GTS 360M 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 shaders of the used GT215 core are based on the GTX 200 desktop architecture and therefore a bit improved compaired to the G92 based cards (e.g. 9800M GT).

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 360M supports Hybrid-SLI (HybridPower but no 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 360M because the SLI combination would not perform better.

The performance of the middle class - high end GPU GeForce GTS 360M should be slightly above the GTS 260M because of the higher clock speed. Demanding DirectX 10 games like Crysis should run fluently in medium to high details and lower resolutions. Older or less demanding games should run in high detail settings and high resolutions fluently. More details about the gaming performance can be found our benchmarks below.

Depending on the the used type of graphics memory (GDDR5, GDDR3) the performance may differ. The maximum clock rate can also differ according to the used graphics RAM. The maximum support clock rate is 2000 MHz for GDDR5.

The power consumption should be similar to the slightly slower clocked GTS 260M, which is rated at 38 Watt TDP. Therefore, the GTS360M is intended for larger laptops with good cooling solutions.

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