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.
| Manufacturer | NVIDIA | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| GeForce 900M Series |
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| Architecture | Maxwell | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pipelines | 512 - unified | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Core Speed | 928 - 1045 (Boost) MHz | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory Speed | 2000 MHz | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory Bus Width | 128 Bit | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory Type | DDR3 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Max. Amount of Memory | 4096 MB | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Shared Memory | no | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| DirectX | DirectX 12 (FL 11_0), Shader 5.0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Transistor Count | 1870 Million | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| technology | 28 nm | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Features | GPU Boost 2.0, Optimus, PhysX, CUDA, GeForce Experience | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Notebook Size | medium sized | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date of Announcement | 12.03.2015 |
Benchmarks
