NVIDIA Unveils New Line of GPUs Discussion

NVIDIA has just announced their newest line of mobile graphics processing units (GPUs) for notebooks during a much-anticipated unveiling event today at CES in Las Vegas: the performance GeForce 500M series.

Read the full content of this Article: NVIDIA Unveils New Line of GPUs

 

This is... unimpressive. Three of those (the 525M, the 540M and the 550M) are the same chip as each other and as the old 420M, 425M and 435M with the only differences being clock speeds (and I suppose lack of 3D vision support on the wimpiest card). The 520M is almost pointless -- its advantage over Sandy Bridge's integrated graphics is unlikely to justify the cost or the extra heat. I was hoping they'd at least use the respun chips, but no, it's the old GF10*. Bah, humbug.

 

According to Engadget, the changes are a lot more than just clock speed, as they perform significantly better than the change in clock speed. As to how this affects gaming performance, we'll have to wait for more reviews. Either way, this is just a fraction of their 500M series. Compared to AMD, half their new 6000M series are similarly rebadged 5000M series.

 

Besides these five 500M cards there are three 400M cards, of which only the GTX 485M is new while the GTX 460M and GTX 470M remain unchanged.

Last time I was in a math class 5/8 was more than 1/2.

 

I would have preferred they announce that they persuaded OEM's to actually use Optimus in gaming laptops like Asus's G-series than rebadge a few low-end GPU's, some of which are actually inferior to the integrated GPU in the Sandy Bridge CPU.

Instead, we get more of the same. On all counts.

 

Hopefully SB integrated graphics (or cenrtainly IB) and AMD's Fusion APU's will make sure Nvidia and Ati won't be able to sell their old renamed junk anymore and will show up with some cards that are actually new, with noticeable ingame (vs only benchmark) performance increase.

 

A lot more than the change in clock speed in what way? AnandTech says:

Here is a review of an ASUS N53SV which has a 540M GPU paired with a 2720QM CPU and gets 8423 in 3DMark06. Compare this to a Dell XPS15 with an 840QM CPU and a 435M GPU which gets 7486 and you'll see that the difference is what you'd expect from a significantly more powerful CPU and a small change in GPU clock speed. The clocks of the 540M are 672/1344/900 while the 435M has 650/1300/800.

 

Didn't check in depth if there was a difference in CPUs, I was just stating what I read from:

Acer Aspire 5742G laptop with NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M graphics reviewed, es ist schnell -- Engadget

Quoted from Notebook Journal, not sure of the reliability but we'll see after more reviews:

"When first announced, we had fears that the new NVIDIA GeForce GT 500M-series graphics would be little more than a tweak of a clock speed here and a new sticker there, as the specs of the 540M (96 CUDA cores, 128-bit memory interface) match the 435M series bit-for-bit. But, a Notebook Journal review of the first laptop to bear NVIDIA's latest, the Acer Aspire 5742G, finds that the performance boost is tangible. "Much stronger," even, scoring 8315 points in 3DMark 06 -- a good bit higher than the 435M scores we've seen. The laptop otherwise is said to be quite a powerhouse, with a massive 8GB of DDR3 memory onboard, but it's a gentle machine too, Optimus letting the thing run cool and long (up to five hours on a charge) when you're not getting your frag on. Indeed it's deemed the most powerful notebook you can buy for €700, and while that translates to roughly $920, we'll have to see what Acer decides to charge when it comes Stateside."