NVIDIA NVS 5400M

More details on the GF108 architecture can be found on the dedicated page of the GeForce GT 435M.

Performance

The performance of the NVS 5400M is slightly below the GeForce GT 630M due to the reduced core clock (660 MHz, 800 MHz Turbo). Nevertheless, most games of 2012 run fluently in medium detail settings.

Features

A novelty of the GF104, GF106 and GF108 chips is the support for Bitstream HD Audio (Blu-Ray) via HDMI. Similar to the Radeon HD 5730, the NVS 5400M can transfer Dolby True HD and DTS-HD bitstream without quality loss to a HiFi receiver.

The NVS5400M offers PureVideo HD technology for video decoding using the GPU. The integrated Video Processor 4 (VP4) supports feature set C and is able to fully decode MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 (MPEG-4 ASP - e.g., DivX or Xvid), VC-1/WMV9, and H.264 (VLD, IDCT, Motion Compensation, and Deblocking). Furthermore, the GPU is able to decode two 1080p streams simultaneously (e.g., for Blu-Ray Picture-in-Picture).

Through CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectCompute 2.1 support, the NVS 5400M can assist in general calculations. For example, the stream processor can encode videos considerably faster than can a modern CPU. Furthermore, physics calculations can be done by the GPU using PhysX (supported in Mafia 2 and Metro 2033). However, the GPU is generally not powerful enough to support both PhysX and high detail game settings at reasonable frame rates.

The power consumption of the graphics card should be similar to the GeForce GT 435M and is therefore suited for 15" or larger laptops. If idle, the chip is clocked at approximately 50/101/137 MHz (chip/shader/memory, respectively) in 2D mode and at 202/405/324 MHz in 3D mode to save power. Furthermore, the Fermi chip supports Optimus to automatically switch between the integrated Intel graphics card and the Nvidia GPU. The implementation of Optimus, however, is dependent on the laptop manufacturer.