NVIDIA GeForce 820M

The NVIDIA GeForce 820M (or GT 820M) is an entry-level DirectX 12 compatible graphics card announced in January 2014. Its core is based on the 28nm GF117 chip (Fermi architecture) and is equipped with 64-bit DDR3 memory. Besides the slightly different clock rate, the 820M is almost identical to the old GeForce 710M and GT 720M.

Architecture

The GF117 is based on the optimized GF108 Fermi chip (GeForce GT 540M) and offers 96 shaders, 16 TMUs and 4 ROPs. Each shader core is clocked twice as fast as the rest of the graphics chip, a technique known as hot clocking. More detailed information on Fermi can be found on the GT 435M GPU page.

It should be noted that the GF117 does not offer dedicated graphic ports and can therefore only be used in conjunction with Optimus.

The 820M supports GPU Boost 2.0, which can automatically overclock the card if the laptop cooling system allows it. This feature is available on any notebook with a graphics card of the 800M series.

Performance

In our gaming benchmarks, the 3D performance of the GeForce 820M is similar to the former GT 720M and the Intel Iris Graphics 5100. This places the card in the entry level segment. Current games (as of 2013/2014) will run fluently only in low settings and resolutions.

Features

The shader cores (also called CUDA cores) can be used for general calculations with APIs such as CUDA, DirectCompute 2.1 and OpenCL. PhysX is theoretically possible, but the 820M is too slow to handle both PhysX and 3D rendering in modern games. 3D Vision is not supported according to Nvidia.

Power consumption

The power consumption of the Geforce 820M should be similar to the old GT 720M. As a result, the GPU is best suited for notebooks 13 inches in size or greater.