NVIDIA GeForce MX110 vs NVIDIA GeForce 945M vs NVIDIA GeForce 930M

NVIDIA GeForce MX110

The Nvidia GeForce MX110 is an entry-level graphics card for laptops that was launched at the end of 2017. It is a renamed Geforce 920MX and based on the Maxwell GM108 chip with a reduced shader count of 256.  According to our sources the TDP of 5-12 Watt and the support for DDR3 and GDDR5 is also specified.

The performance is on par with the GeForce 920MX and depends on the used graphics memory. Therefore, demanding games from 2015 may not run at all fluently or only in lowest settings. Less demanding games, like The Sims 4, should be playable in medium to high settings.

NVIDIA GeForce 945M

The NVIDIA GeForce 945M is a mid-range, DirectX 12-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 945M offers 512 shaders (compared to the 640 of the GTX 950M) clocked at 928 MHz. The dedicated DDR3 graphics memory is connected with a 128 Bit bus clocked at 1000 MHz (effective 2000, 32 GB/s). 

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

The performance of the 945M is slightly worse than the GTX 950M but clearly faster than the 940M. The DDR3 variant of the GTX 950M is about 10 percent faster for example. Therefore, it is most suited for medium details of demanding games in 2015 (see below for benchmarks).

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 945M should be somewhere around 40 Watt. Therefore it is most suited for bigger laptops from 14-inch and up.

NVIDIA GeForce 930M

The NVIDIA GeForce 930M (sometimes also called Nvidia GeForce GT 930M) is a (lower) mid-range, DirectX 11-compatible graphics card for laptops unveiled in March 2015. It is based on the last years GeForce 840M. In addition to the "normal" 25 Watt 930M, there is also a low power variant with a TDP of 12 Watt and support for DDR3 and GDDR5. The DDR3 variant should be approximately 10% slower than the 25 Watt version. The performance of the GDDR5 version is still unknown. The shader count for these low power 930M are also unknown. As the LP version is clocked only at 457 MHz + Boost it may feature more shaders (or a high Boost).

Update: The N16S-LP variant (5-12 Watt TDP, Low Power version?) will be available with GDDR5 starting in the first quarter of 2016. Later in 2016, the successor named GeForce 930MX was released that was available with GDDR5.

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. The 930M should feature the full GM108 with 3 SMMs (384 shader cores, 24 TMUs, and 8 ROPs due to the 64-bit interface). 

Another optimization is the massively enlarged L2 cache. The larger size can process some of the memory traffic to allow for a relatively narrow memory interface without significantly reducing performance.

Similar to GM107, the GM108 supports DirectX 12 with Feature Level 11_0 only.

Performance

The performance should be a bit below an average GeForce 840M due to the slower core clock. This means that demanding games like Evolve are only playable in lowest settings. Less demanding games like F1 2014 or Fifa 15 on the other hand should run in highest settings. See gaming benchmarks below for more details.

Features

GM108 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 930M should be about 33 Watts or less. Therefore, the 930M is best suited for laptops 13 inches in size or larger. The 900M series also supports Optimus to automatically switch between an integrated graphics card and the Nvidia GPU.