Nvidia: 7 new GeForce 400M graphics cards announced

The new graphics cards are not only reduced GeForce GTX 480M chips, their architecture was especially adapted to the consumer market. Because of these changes, it is no longer possible to compare their performance to older graphics cards based on the number of shaders.

The new graphics cards are based on three different chips, the GF104 (max. 384 shaders), the GF106 (max. 192 shaders), and the GF108 (max. 96 shaders). They all use the same architecture.

Compared with the older generation, the 400M series offers some new features. The cores now support DirectX 11 and their, compared to the competition, fast tessellation performance should convince. The GTX 460M and GT 420M were able to prove this in our benchmarks.

A new feature of the GF104/106/108 chips is that they support bitstream transfer of HD Audio (Dolby True HD and DTS-HD) via HDMI.

Furthermore, Nvidia promotes the new Vision 3D support of the 400M series. It allows to display 3D contents on a TV (via HDMI 1.4a) or on an internal 3D display. However, such must be built-in by the laptop manufacturer.

Remarkably, Nvidia did not introduce new entry-level graphics cards (i.e., no direct successor of the GeForce G 310MNVIDIA GeForce 310M). In consideration of the Fusion products of AMD and that the coming Sandy Bridge processors of Intel will feature faster integrated graphics chips, that's by no means astonishing.

We could already evaluate the performance of the new generation inside two test samples. The Toshiba Qosmio X500 houses a GeForce GTX 460M, which turned out to be faster than a Mobility Radeon HD 5850 / GeForce GTX 285M on average. Detailed results are available on our special GeForce GTX 460M page.

The second test device was an Acer Aspire 5745PG with GeForce GT 420M.  It is about on par with the GT 330M. Again further details are available on our GeForce GT 420M page.