NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M vs Intel HD Graphics 530

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M is an upper mid-range, DirectX 11-compatible graphics card for laptops unveiled in March 2015. It is based on Nvidia's Maxwell architecture (GM107 chip) and manufactured in 28 nm. The GTX 960M offers 640 shader units clocked at 1097 - 1202 MHz (Boost) as well as fast GDDR5 memory (128 bit, 5000 MHz effective, 80 GB/s).

Compared to the previous and technically very similar GTX 860M, the GTX 960M is clocked slightly higher.

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.

GM107 supports DirectX 12 with feature level 11_0 only.

Performance

Although the GTX 960M has the same memory bandwidth as the previous GTX 860M, its higher core clock leads to a slightly better performance. Overall, the 960M is almost 10 percent faster and similar to the desktop GTX 750 Ti.

Many games of 2014/2015 can be played fluently in FullHD resolution and high detail settings. However, very demanding games such as Assassin's Creed Unity will require lower resolutions and/or details.

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 960M should be similar to the old GTX 860M (about 60 watts). Therefore, the GPU is best suited for 15-inch laptops or larger. The 900M series also supports Optimus to automatically switch between an integrated graphics card and the Nvidia GPU.

Intel HD Graphics 530

The Intel HD Graphics 530 (GT2) is an integrated graphics unit, which can be found in various desktop and notebook processors of the Skylake generation. The "GT2" version of the Skylake GPU offers 24 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at up to 1150 MHz (depending on the CPU model). Due to its lack of dedicated graphics memory or eDRAM cache, the HD 530 has to access the main memory (2x 64bit DDR3L-1600 / DDR4-2133).

Performance

The exact performance of the HD Graphics 530 depends on various factors like TDP, L3 Cache, memory (DDR3/DDR4) and maximum clock rate of the specific model. The fastest desktop versions (Core i7-6700K) can compete with a dedicated GeForce 920M and will handle modern games (as of 2015) in low or medium settings.

Features

The revised video engine now decodes H.265/HEVC completely in hardware and thereby much more efficiently than before. Displays can be connected via DP 1.2 / eDP 1.3 (max. 3840 x 2160 @ 60 Hz), whereas HDMI is limited to the older version 1.4a (max. 3840 x 2160 @ 30 Hz). However, HDMI 2.0 can be added using a DisplayPort converter. Up to three displays can be controlled simultaneously.

Power Consumption

The HD Graphics 530 can be found in several notebook and desktop processors of different TDP classes (35 - 91 W).