The Nividia GeForce GT 230M is a DirectX 10.1 graphics adapter for notebooks based on the GT216 core. Because of the 48 shader cores, it should perform better than the GT 130M and due to the 40nm production process the power consumption should stay the same.
The core of the GT230M is internally called GT216 and according to Nvidia based on the current high-end desktop architecture (GTX 200 series). Furthermore, Nvidia has improved the micro-architecture for further power saving and performance increases. Therefore, the performance per shader unit should be slightly improved compared to the previous generation.
As the GeForce 9700M GTS, the GT 230M features 48 stream processors that do the work of the former dedicated pixel- and vertex-shaders. The unified shaders of Nvidia are 1-dimensional (AMD has 5-dimensional shaders which leads to the higher number of shaders).
The GeForce GT230M also supports CUDA, DirectX Compute, OpenCL, and PhysiX to use the shaders for other tasks than rendering images (like encoding videos, calculating the physics of a game or mathematical tasks). For these special tasks, the GPU can be noticeably faster than current CPUs.
The mobile graphics card has a built in video decoder called PureVideo HD with VP4. The Video Processor 4 (VP4) supports the full decoding of H.264, VC-1, and now also MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. DivX or XviD). MPEG-1 still wont be supported, but the decoding of this codec is quite trivial on a CPU.
In conjunction with a chipset from Nvidia with integrated graphics (e.g. 9400M), the GT 230M supports Hybrid-SLI (HybridPower and GeForceBoost). HybridPower is a technique to choose between the integrated and dedicated graphics core, if performance or battery runtime is needed. This works only in Windows Vista (and possibly Windows 7). Up to now the user has to use a tool to switch between the GPUs. Later Nvidia wants to switch automatically in the drivers. GeForceBoost is not supported by the G 230M because the SLI combination would not perform better.
The performance of the middle class gpu GT 230M should be somewhere between the GeForce GT130M and the 9700M GTS and below the GT 240M because of the lower clock rate. Demanding DirectX 10 games like Crysis should run fluently in medium details. Older or less demanding games should run in high detail settings and high resolutions.
Depending on the the used type of graphicsmemory (GDDR2, GDDR3 or perhaps even DDR2/DDR3) the performance may differ noticeably.
The power consumption of the mobile graphics card is - like the GT 130M and GT 240M - 23 Watt (TDP). Furthermore, according to Nvidia, the new improved core does only need half of the power in Idle mode.
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailled information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.
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