NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M is an upper mid-range, DirectX 12-compatible graphics card for laptops unveiled in March 2014. It is one of the first cards based on Nvidia's new Maxwell architecture (GM107 chip), but is still manufactured in 28 nm. The GTX 860M offers 640 shader units clocked at 1029 MHz (+ Boost) as well as 4 GB of GDDR5 memory (128 bit, 5000 MHz effective).

Alternatively, there is also a version based on the Kepler chip GK104, which has 1152 shader units clocked at 797 MHz.

Architecture

Compared to Kepler, Maxwell has been optimized in several details to increase power efficiency. Smaller Streaming Multiprocessors (SMM) with only 128 ALUs (Kepler: 192) and an optimized scheduler should lead to better utilization of the shaders. Nvidia promises that a Maxwell SMM with 128 ALUs can offer 90 percent of the performance of a Kepler SMX with 192 ALUs. GM107 features 5 SMMs and thus 640 shader cores, 40 TMUs and 16 ROPs (128-bit interface).

Another optimization is the massively enlarged L2 cache (GM107: 2 MB). The increased size can handle some of the memory traffic to allow for a relatively narrow memory interface without significantly reducing the performance.

Similar to Fermi and Kepler, Maxwell / GM107 supports DirectX 11.2 with feature level 11.0 only.

Performance

Although the GTX 860M has much less memory bandwidth and computing power, it can compete with (or sometimes even beat) the old Kepler-based GeForce GTX 770M while drawing significantly less power. Many games of 2013/2014 (Tomb Raider or BioShock Infinite, etc.) can be played fluently in FullHD resolution and very high detail settings. However, very demanding games such as Crysis 3 or Battlefield 4 will require lower resolutions and/or details.

Despite its considerably higher shader count, the Kepler version is about 10 percent slower, mainly due to the worse bandwidth efficiency.

Features

GM107 integrates the sixth generation of the PureVideo HD video engine (VP6), offering a better decoding performance for H.264 and MPEG-2 videos. Of course, VP6 supports all features of previous generations (4K support, PIP, video encoding via NVENC API). Unfortunately, HDMI 2.0 is still not supported.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the GeForce GTX 860M should be similar to the old GTX 765M (about 60 watts). The low-clocked Kepler version draws just slightly more power. Therefore, the 860M is best suited for 15-inch laptops or larger. The 800M series also supports Optimus to automatically switch between an integrated graphics card and the Nvidia GPU.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile

The Nvidia GTX 1050 is a mainstream GPU based on the Pascal architecture and was announced in January 2017. Contrary to the faster models, the GTX 1050 uses the GP107 chip, which is manufactured in a 14 nm process at Samsung.

The notebook version differs a bit in terms of clocks, but is equipped with 640 shader units, just like the desktop model. It is shipped with up to 4 GB GDDR5-VRAM attached via 128-bit interface and a 7 Gbps memory data rate (112 GB/s).

Features

The GP107 chip is manufactured in a 14 nm FinFET process at Samsung and offers a number of new features, including support for DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) as well as improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). A full list of improvements and the new Pascal desktop GPUs is available in our dedicated Pascal architecture article.

Performance

The performance of the GeForce GTX 1050 can vary quite a lot depending on the cooling performance of the laptop. It can be just as fast as the desktop model under ideal conditions, but the notebook model is usually a bit slower. The GeForce GTX 960M is beaten by around 30%, so the GTX 1050 is comparable to a GTX 965M in general. It is therefore an upper mainstream GPU. Games from 2016 can be played in high settings an the Full HD resolution.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the GeForce GTX 1050 is roughly on par with the old GTX 960M, which would mean around 40-50 Watts and (probably due to better selection and optimized parts) therefore much lower compared to the desktop counterpart. This means the graphics card will usually be used for powerful multimedia notebooks and entry-level gaming systems with at least 15.4 inches.