nVidia 8400M GS Graphics Review

by Dustin Sklavos

nVidia's GeForce 8400M GS is, quite frankly, ubiquitous at this point. It is the go-to mass dedicated graphics part for both Dell and HP, the two biggest notebook retailers in North America. If you're getting dedicated graphics in your laptop, chances are it's going to be one of these (with nVidia's 8600M parts running a moderate second).

Hardware wise, the 8400M GS boasts a minimal 64-bit memory bus and 16 unified shaders, offering the bare minimum for basic gaming performance. It remains comparable to its desktop counterpart.

Of course, the big question is: can it actually game halfway decently? Certainly a lot of people on the forums here will attest to this, but I figured I'd examine its performance for myself.

Test Systems and Settings

My 8400M GS is one of the lesser ones, featuring only 64MB of dedicated memory. The more common 128MB and 256MB versions will try to leverage nVidia's TurboCache shared memory technology, but this is the only one that's going to really need it.

It comes to me in a custom-built HP dv2000t. Not long after I ordered my notebook, HP refreshed the line, bumping the GeForce 8400M GS in it from 64MB to 128MB of video memory. With the increased video memory should come a small but respectable boost in performance.

My unit features the following specifications:

HP Pavilion dv2000t

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (2GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)
• 2GB DDR2-667 Dual Channel
• 160GB 5400rpm SATA Hitachi TravelStar
• 1280x800 WXGA Screen
• Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
• ForceWare 156.65 (HP's most recent version posted.)

By ordering the dv2000t with the GeForce 8400M GS, my unit also includes a very handy HDMI port, but sacrifices a USB port to get it.

I've retired Unreal Tournament 2004 from my test suite; modern dedicated graphics will have no problem whatsoever with maxing out this game and probably even applying a little anti-aliasing. I have, however, added Crysis. Crysis is unquestionably the most demanding game available, and bears inclusion as a representative of what games in the future (probably at least six months into the future) may require of hardware.

DOOM 3

Doom 3 should probably be retired for Quake 4 or Enemy Territory in the future, but for now it's a decent gauge of OpenGL performance. Here, the 8400M GS acquits itself admirably as nVidia hardware traditionally does in these games.

At 1280x800 High Quality, the 8400M GS yielded 37fps in Doom 3's built-in timedemo. Gameplay is plenty smooth and viable in this game, a game that just a few short years ago was being used to punish hardware just like Crysis is today.

HALF-LIFE 2: LOST COAST

As traditional, I used the built in stress test that comes with Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, which I think is an excellent indicator of how the card will handle Source engine games.

Set at 1280x800 with all settings maxed except for Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering, the stress run of Lost Coast yielded an average of 44fps. The run definitely dipped and chopped a little in parts, but was for the most part very smooth.

As a sidenote, a friend of mine played through the vast majority of Portal on this system at these settings and it was definitely smooth enough there. The 8400M GS has no problems with Source engine games.

FEAR

The more time I spend benchmarking FEAR, the more of a curiosity I find it. Generally regarded as still a fairly punishing the game, my experience with it has found it to be remarkably forgiving of even integrated graphics hardware. More often than not, it just seems like there's a specific level of performance the game wants to produce.

Here, mercifully, that performance is again playable. In a fairly impressive feat for the 8400M GS, I ran FEAR at 1280x800 with all settings at Maximum, no AA or AF, and no Soft Shadows and achieved 29fps average, with a 14fps minimum. A little bit of tweaking can probably bring that 29 up over 30, but I found it plenty playable at these settings. The 128MB version of the 8400M GS would have no problems here.

UNREAL TOURNAMENT 3

This was actually kind of a struggle. I had a notebook with an 8400M G (not GS, half the shader power) that handled the demo for UT3 at 1024x600 medium settings plenty playably, but on the GS with HP's drivers, the best I could really do was 800x600 at the same middle-of-the-road settings.

UT3 is definitely playable here, but Unreal Engine 3 in general seems to really throttle memory bandwidth, as I was met with similarly poor performance in Rainbow Six: Vegas and Bioshock. So consider this a heads-up: games based on Unreal Engine 3 are gonna struggle big time on hardware with a 64-bit memory bus.

GUILD WARS

Guild Wars, now ancient but a bit more demanding on hardware than World of Warcraft, runs flawlessly on the 8400M GS. I was able to get it to max out at 1280x800, even with 2xAA. So MMORPG fans take note: Guild Wars and WoW will be quite happy on the 8400M GS.

FAR CRY

Here's the first place where the 8400M GS struggled more than I'd expected it to. Far Cry isn't exactly more demanding than FEAR, yet the 8400M GS performed better in FEAR. Far Cry ran fine maxed out in indoor areas, but the instant I went outdoors the game crawled badly. I had to drop all the settings down to High and from there, the game ran fine.

Far Cry is a pretty old game at this point, materializing around the same time Doom 3 did, and with the kind of shader power modern graphics leverage (sixteen unified shaders is still pretty healthy) it should be a non-issue.

Ultimately, the game was playable at 1280x800 High settings (water on Ultra High), and handled very well there. It's just a bit of a drag that it didn't perform better.

CRYSIS

My feelings (read: general disdain) for Crysis are pretty well known on the forums here, but it bears mentioning that the 64MB 8400M GS struggles horrendously with Crysis even on minimal settings. While I'm sure you could probably play through it on here, you wouldn't do it happily. I suspect the 128MB version would fare somewhat better, but I doubt it'll let you really turn anything up.

But then, Crysis is dragging desktop GeForce 8800s to their knees at 1280x800 (if set to Very High). It stands to reason it'd murder cards a tenth as powerful.

Driver Woes

While the GeForce 8400M GS is a pretty respectable performer, especially given its commonality, it does suffer from one major problem: it's an nVidia part. nVidia's driver quality, while substantially improved from when Vista came out, is still pretty much a dog. It's disheartening because nVidia used to be the industry gold standard for quality drivers.

On my laptop, I've had errors relating to nVidia's driver, and my desktop on Vista x64 has fared worse still.

Features that were exposed in XP are also absent here, at least in the driver my notebook came with - the same driver most users will stick with rather than going through the hassle of using a laptopvideo2go driver. Specifically, there's no way to create a custom resolution, and popular compromise resolution 1024x600 is absent here.

Conclusion

For the frugal gamer, the GeForce 8400M GS has a lot to offer, with performance that plays all modern games fairly well, excepting Crysis, which has the misfortune of Tri-SLI'ed 8800 Ultras being just a little too big to fit in a laptop. But all other games should have few problems with the 8400M GS.

As a sidenote, I've found the 8400M's impact on my battery life to actually be a fairly minimal one, and a nice bonus to running it in Vista is not having to mess with PowerPlay settings at all on the battery; gaming performance on the battery is identical to performance plugged in because the GPU automatically ramps its clock speed back up as needed.

The nice thing about this review is being able to see how far we've come in just a couple short years. The 8400M GS is more or less the bottom of the barrel for mobile dedicated graphics, yet it offers very reasonable performance and runs modern games at better-than-minimum settings. The performance in FEAR was particularly striking; FEAR is still being used to punish high end hardware in reviews, yet the 8400M GS handles it with aplomb.

It's not all bread and roses, though, as true next generation games start trickling in. Unreal Engine 3 games make the 64-bit memory bus on the 8400M G and GS cry bloody murder, and Crysis barely runs playably. The recently published requirements for the PC version of Assassin's Creed also border on downright terrifying.

And then there's the story of DirectX 10, which is revealing itself to be a very ugly technological transition. Something that promised us improved performance instead strangles even high end hardware, leaving it as a checkbox feature on lower class parts. Thus far, the only game whose DirectX 10 mode doesn't massacre performance is Bioshock, but Bioshock barely uses DirectX 10 anyhow.

Still, the 8400M GS is a fantastic choice for older games, and a pretty reasonable one for modern and future games. It's not going to break speed records or win awards and it should NOT be relied on as a gamer's only graphics hardware, but it'll do in a pinch and it's ideal for the MMORPG geek who has to feed her addiction even when she's not in front of her desktop.

 

a well-written and thorough review of the 8400M GS. insightful read, thanks!

i have the 128 MB version on my dell vostro. quite satisfied with it so far.

 

Good Review. It's a shame you didn't mention anything about overclocking. My 8400GS is a BEASTLY overclocker. I have never seen anything quite like it...

Mine went from 400/500 all the way up to ~650/800+. My 3dmark05 score went from 2900 to 5000! And 3dmark06 from 1200 to over 2k in 06. That puts it right around the respectable level of 8600GS speeds. Link for screen shots, and driver's and more info on my overclock.

 

I am using drivers from lv2g on my 8400m gs 64mb.

I could run the unreal tournament 3 demo at 864x480 playablely at med
I think this should be the page I put it on, (I am capped at 64kbps so its taking forever to load)

Quake Wars playable at high 1024x600

Crysis not terrible at med/low

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=191298&page=4&highlight=johnyd

 

Crysis runs around 30 fps for me 800x600 low-med settings on 169.28, very playable
I'm pretty happy with my 8400m gs nice review

 

Excellent review.

I share the same sentiment on the crysis, crisis. Not very business smart to make a game that only runs its best on systems that cost north of >$5000.

In any event, would love ot see a review of the Nvidia 8600 GS, 256mb.

(Or maybe there is one and I failed to search properly.)

 

I have a 8600M GS, in my benq joybook s41.

I believe I was getting 3dmark06 of 2939 with 169.04 drivers.

The specs on the BenQ website are:

nVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GS
* VRAM: DDR3 128bit 256MB
* Max.1GB TurboCache

so I guess its DDR3 as well...

Just puting this out for reference, I don't think the 8400m compares to it even with overclocking...

 

Can you post the exact settings you used for farcry? I have the same specs as you on my m1330 and I've had similar performance with the settings you mentioned in your games. But for far cry, not matter what i do it runs like ass. And there is often this "blue fog" thing. I gave up an uninstalled the game, but if you got it running so nicely, can you tell me what settings you used?

 

Pulp...thanks for an excellent informative review. It's good to see what a 8400M GS graphic card can handle regarding games.

And I'm also surprise about the performance you got with F.E.A.R. It just depicts superior programming.

Just curious to see what FPS you will get on Call of Duty 4 if you have the game.

Again thanks.

 

For anyone interested, I played FlightSim X on my 8400GS powered HP at native screen res (1280x800) with abysmal results. I had to drop to the lowest settings and even then I had major frame rate drops and generally poor frame rates all around.

Rates increased somewhat when the aircraft was in the air at high enough altitude that ground textures weren't displayed, but not enough to make this game playable on a 8400GS. By playable I mean relatively smooth with no headache-inducing frame rates.

This game has to be one of the most punishing games out there on video cards.

 

Yup, the 8400GS in not close to the 8600GS (DDR3) at all. I got 2700 on 3dmark06 with default drivers on my Sony. Thats just a synthetic test, there will be a huge difference in real time testing.

But still, now looking, I rather go a laptop with a less powerful GPU. The 8400GS seems about right for the games I play tbh. Plus it'll benefit me hugely in battery life. Its put me into perspective about choosing my future laptops (this was my first). Gaming and laptops just don't go hand in hand for me - there is always a negative.

Btw, superb review. Very informative and it shows begginers to laptop gaming that you don't need at least an 8600GT to run games respectively. You've also given me an idea of writing a review on the 8600GS!!

Nice one,
Jam.

 

I have the Quadro NVS 135M, which is basically a 8400M GS in my Dell D630. When it comes to playing on the 14,1" LCD-s native 1440x900 resolution, few games run good but usually I have to drop the resolution down to 1280x800 or 1024x640. CoD4 almost ran playably (over 40fps) with the latter.

Forgot to add, 135M comes with 128MB GDDR3 but only on a 64bit bus.

 

Looking forward to this!

 

Wait a second, was this review done with the 64 or the 128 dedicated memory version? If it was the 64, then no wonder Far Cry especially ran so bad, it wants 128 MB, and even 256 MB can improve performance a bit more too. Other HP machines like the dv6000 series laptops have 8400GSs with 256 MB dedicated VRAM. I sell computers at my place of work, and we sell a certain HP dv6670se that has a Turion x2 TL-62, 3 GB DDR2, 250 GB HDD, and 8400GS w/ 256 MB Ded. VRAM, that's the machine I'd like to test.

 

Thanks for the review and the mention of how the card handles World of Warcraft (the only I game I really play) basically settles a cheap (£400 or less) Dell Vostro 1500 as my next notebook.

Thanks again ^^

 

Well, I'll have a go. I was a complete noob to GPU's only about 6 months ago, but I think I have enough knowledge to get some performances for a few games.

Beware though, I'll do it when I have time - I've currently got a lot on

 

Sounds good. BTW, can you tell us how 8600GS in Euro FZ is clocked?

 

Wow...

Even so, 64mb dedicated the VRAM, along with 64-bit interface can deliver Maximum, 1280x800 at F.E.A.R.? I remember the days when the 64mb 7400 could barely handle F.E.A.R. at Medium @ 800x600.

 

thank you , this is something I needed to show to my friend who is about to buy a laptop for light gaming, photoshop work and vedeo encoding.

I think this gpu is good enough for him although he is interested in nv8600gs , I dont know what difference there between 2 any way.


have a good weekend.

 

These things are damn good overclockers, like Jason said. I just pushed mine to 550/800, haven't had time to find its full potential. Getting a little bit over 2000 in 3D06 and around 4600 in 3D05.

FSX is an extremely taxing game. My X1900 can't handle it at medium settings, even when overclocked. It got so ridiculous that I just switched back to FS9.

The 8600GS slots in below the 8600M GT but above the 8400M GT if I am correct. But the 8400M GT should perform close to if not better than the 8600, given how it has a 128-bit bus (the only big difference being clock speeds). Correct me if I am wrong about any of this.

 

Depends what memory the 8600GS uses. Nearly all 8400GT's I know of use DDR3 compared to earlier 8600GS DDR2 laptops such as the Asus F3sv are about equivelent in gaming. The 8600GS DDR3 is similiar to the 8600GT DDR2.

3dmarks 8400GT ~ 2400, 8600GS ~ 2900 .

 

I find it strange that crysis is unplayable. on my 64bit x1700, which should be pretty similar to the 8400 gs, at 848x480 with everything at low except water, bloom and physics(low) i got about 30-40 fps. And that was with a 1.6 ghz C2D and only 1 gig of ram

 

Hey guys.

I'm new at all of this and I would like to overclock my nVidia 8400M GS, but don't know how. So it would be nice if someone could decribe how to overclock, in a way so everyone could understand it You can add me on msn [email protected] or decribe it in the thread if that pleases you most.

Thanks

;Sorry for my english

 

I would make a new thread about this issue. I'm sure people will gladly help you out. All I can say though, the program you need to overclock is RivaTuner. Still, don't experiment with it by yourself - you could harm your graphics card if you do something wrong - make a new thread

 

Okay. Thanks for the advice

 

Hey Guys- I have the m1330 with 8400M GS and I am struggling with games. I loaded Gears of War and it asks for a newer driver. The Dell website does not have anything newer than the '7.15.11.5669' version (156.69) I currently have. I downloaded the 169.25 package but that wont install (its for 8400GS and not for 8400M GS- i guess??)
Anyways, GOW does not even start- it crashes at the menu itself! Also Half Life2 Portal works but sometimes during gameplay- the screen goes blank and the system hangs. I have to cold boot and restart the system.
This is also happening with Counterstrike and DOD.
Apologies for being a noob- but please help!!!
(Some of you have been mentioning 169.28 with m1330- how??)

 

go to laptopvideo2go website and get the latest driver and inf there.

 

So, what??? How am I supposed to determine how good the 8400M GS runs with games like the ones tested like Crysis, Far Cry, and F.E.A.R. when it is based on the 64-MB hardware. I'm looking at a 128MB 8400M GS, and now, I don't have exact answers if NOW those games would run better on that 128MB card...

 

I'm running an 8400M GS on my 2.0Ghz Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM.
I have the 128Mb version of the 8400MGS with a total of 879Mb including the shared VRAM.
I can run Bioshock fairly well (1200x800 native resolution with medium settings).
Age of Empires 3 runs wonderfully on it (1200X800 resolution and all settings to high except antialiasing)
Crysis is, of course, a slideshow no matter how low I set things (any hints on improving performance here?)
I have a question though, How much can I count the shared VRAM for? I know that it is slower than the dedicated VRAM since it has to borrow it.
So my question is, should I completely discount the shared VRAM when looking to see if my computer can run a game?

 

A good read. I've got the 128 MB card in my new Vostro 1400. I'll be giving it a workout today. My main interest was in getting a machine that could play WoW. Since my expectations weren't that high, I was hoping the 8400M would meet my needs (while letting me stick with a smaller 14.1'' notebook)

I was very pleased that I could max the settings on WoW (1440x900) with 1x color sampling and still have a playable framerate. I did have to drop the draw distance down to about 60% to get around 20-25 FPS in Shattrath City (for those who don't know the game, this area is one of the nastiest for your framerate)

I got as high as 60 FPS while stationary in Orgrimmar (another area of the game) though this was before I started playing with the settings heavily.

The card is slightly worse then the 8500GT I have in my desktop (I can max the draw distance on my desktop) but I'm pleased to report that the game still looks great on the 8400M.

Anyone looking to play some older games or wanting some light gaming capabilities on their smaller notebook should be satisfied with the 8400M as long as they have realistic expectations of what the card can do.

 

How can I know the amount of memory my peice of 8400M GS have ? I bought an HP pavilion laptop with T5750 processor.

 

look up the specs on HP's site

 

Guys, is anybody here that is using 8400M GS for watching high def movies? I am, but I am unable to set the Hardware Accel to work in PowerDVD and I am looking for some help.

 

hi
i m new 2 this 4-m.This post is not an answer to any question asked here.......just a few of my observations about 8400m gs 128 mb
i play games at the lowest possible settings 640*480,with everything else either at low or med.here i post some of my observations with nvidia geforce
8400m gs(128 mb) on my dell vostro 1500(1.6 gigs C2D,2 gigs ram,5400 rpm hitachi hdd,WXGA 1440x900 res.,Win XP Home.)

Quake 4:max 240 fps,min 39 fps(generally while shooting the Dark matter gen. gun) (640x480,low)

Doom 3:max >160 fps,min 57 fps(640x480,low)

Farcry:60 fps extremely smooth(800x600 low),stunning visuals,playable even at 800x600 high settings.1024x768 med.

Ut2004:smooth gameplay even on the highest settings(1024x768,highest settings)

Stranglehold:This made my card struggle.this game is based on Unreal 3 Engine and the game demo was running at barely playable 21-22 fps at 800*600 at med settings.

Crysis:This was the heaviest game encountered ever.Managed to play on Vista Home Premium and on Win Server 2008 with 21-22 fps with lowest settings.It was pathetic on Win XP(DX 9 issues),but manageable on vista.(640x480 ,lowest)

Halo:Combat Evolved:Smooth gameplay at 800x600,and 1024x768 medium settings

Unreal Tournament 3:good performance at 640x480,low settings,definitely playable got around 45 fps max and 23 fps min.the game rocks.........

Unreal Tournament-GOTY(1999)-rocks with highest settings at 1440x900.one of the best shooters out there.........

Unreal Tournament 2003:same performance as UT2004.

Need for Speed(NFS) Most Wanted::looks stunning and works equally good at 1024x768 with everything maxed out except V-Sync.Older NFSs perform remarkably.

NFS Carbon:great looking and smooth playing at 800x600 with everything maxed out.

NFS Prostreet:smooth perforance on 640x480 with medium settings
and 800x600 at low settings.didnt check at higher res.

Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare::smooth 25-27 fps at 640x480 with low-med settings.

Empire Earth 3::rocks at 640x480,with med settings,shows a noticeable lag at 800x600 med settings but still playable,non crappy performance.

Civilisation 4:smooth at 800x600,1024x768 med settings.

Warcraft 3:Reign of Chaos+Frozen Throne::superb performance on 1024x768 highest settings.Excellent game..........

Prince of Persia:Sands of time,warrior within,Two thrones:smooth 30-35 fps at 1024x768 high settings

Grand Theft Auto-1,2,3,Vice City,San Andreas::smooth at 1024x768 at highest settings.Overall these games do not show performance glitches and are playable on all types of systems >2003.

Age of series:Empires 1.2 and Mythology:no problems at highest settings 1024x768 resolutions.

F.E.A.R:good at 800x600 low med settings,becomes choppy at 1024x768 med settings but playable..........visually not so good,got max 47 fps and min 21 fps at 1024x768 highest settings with vsync off.

Enemy Territory Quake Wars:decentgameplay at 640x480,800x600 medium settings,playable even at 1024x768 high settings


So if visual treats are lesser important than the gameplay itself,lowest settings can be tried,so as to have a better experience.Anyway games these days are good looking even at low settings..8400m gs OK 4 pre mid 2007 games,but for post mid 2007 games Bioshock,Crysis,Assasins Creed ,Supreme Commander ,COD 4 etc.,better to have 8600m gt 256 mb or higher graphics card) and for Warmonger.............just pray.........

 

Which os do you have.I tried Crysis on Xp and it didnt play well,screen turned black(maybe because of DX9),then tried on Vista home premium and Win Server 2008,and atleast the game worked ,though choppy 21-22 fps at lowest settings
but was playable atleast,Crysis looks good even at the lowest settings........

 

what a well written review, you should work for a gaming magazine or something.

 

saw this thread and just had to say something

One of my systems, a Pavillion Dv6817tx, Vista Home Premium 32bit, runs Unreal Tournament 3 Flawlessly on 1280X800+everything maxed out

I am running the 256mb version of the 8400M GS

This graphics card is maverlous with the core and memory clock overclocked at 600mhz, and the shader clock at 1200mhz. Overclocked with Rivatuner.

This is also helped by the 4gb of Hynix gaming ram that i have recently invested in

Lv2g(laptopvideo2go) releases drivers for the 8400M GS and similar models

I am running on the 176.68 forceware driver released by the site (Lv2g)

 

check the GPU speed... I found that my HP V3606TX has been underclocked to 169/100 from 400/600

i am currently filing my complaint with HP for MISREPRESENTATION...

you can download the tester from here
http://downloads.guru3d.com/GPU-Z-0.3.4-download-2073.html

 

Wow you really brought back an old school on here

 

He sure did, resurrecting old threads is never a good idea

BTW i have no reason to contact HP As i Now hold the record for 3dmark06 for this exact card

 

It's done well for my needs. Provides the power for games I've wanted to play, and hasn't done too terribly on battery life.

 

Have you tried undervolting your cpu?

Have got the battery to last 4 hours while playing CoD4