CES 2011: Nvidia launch GeForce GT 500M serie and GTX 485M GPU

Teaser

Not only AMD present a new lineup on the CES in Las Vegas, also Nvidia refresh their graphics range. It includes a complete lineup of the GT 500M mid-range GPUs and the GTX 485M high-end graphics card.

J. Simon Leitner, Published 01/05/2011

In China, laptops with GT 540M graphics are already available for a while. Now, the rest of the world may come to know it, too: Surprise! Nvidia launches the new GT 500M graphics series.

What's new is that is based on the GT119 chip (410M, 520M), which should have some advantages compared to the 400M series. It brings more power and above all new features for consumers. Now, the whole lineup supports DirectX 11, PhysX, and CUDA. The graphics cards can be equipped with up to 1.5GB video memory, either in form of DDR3 or GDDR5 modules.

Detailed information about the GT 540M is, e.g., available in our review of the Asus N53SV notebook with Intel Sandy Bridge CPU and Geforce GT 540M graphics card. Our comparison of laptop graphics cards and the special GPU articles linked in the following table inform about the other graphics cards.

Without attracting a great deal of attention Nvidia also present their new high-end graphics solution, the Geforce GTX 485M and successor of the GTX 480M 'Fermi'. However, it is based on a completely different architecture (fully-fledged GT104 chip) and is rather related to the GTX 470M. A comprehensive review of the GTX 485M is available here at notebookcheck.net.

Name	Process	Pipelines	Core	Shader	Memory	Bandwidth	DirectX
Performance
Geforce GT 555M	40nm	144	590 MHz	1180 MHz	900 MHz	192bit	DX11
Geforce GT 550M	40nm	96	740 MHz	1480 MHz	900 MHz	128bit	DX11
Geforce GT 540M	40nm	96	672 MHz	1344 MHz	up to 900 MHz	128bit	DX11
Geforce GT 525M	40nm	96	600 MHz	1200 MHz	900 MHz	128bit	DX11
Geforce GT 520M	40nm	48	740 MHz	1480 MHz	800 MHz	64bit	DX11
High-End
Geforce GTX 485M	40nm	384	575	1150	1500	256bit	DX11