NVIDIA Announces GeForce 400M Series Notebook GPUS

In preparation for the notebooks coming out this holiday season today NVIDIA announced the company’s new mobile graphics processor — the GeForce 400M Series. As part of the new GeForce 400M series NVIDIA has announced 7 new GPUS all of which support Optimus and CUDA for intelligent switching and GPU computing.

The new GeForce 400M series includes the following processors which will run on the Verde driver.

  • GeForce GT 445M, GT 435M, GT 425M, GT 420M and GT 415M for performance users
  • GeForce GTX 470M and GTX 460M, for enthusiast users

The 400M series is based on the new Fermi architecture and according to NVIDIA perform 40% faster than the previous 300M series GPUs. Each of the GPU models announced today support PhysX and have been developed specifically for DirectX 11.

What’s special about the new GeForce 400M GPUs?

In the past consumers may not have paid much attention to the GPU in their notebooks unless they wanted to play games but these days, with more users turning to their notebooks for content creation and entertainment, there is an increased emphasis on the graphical power.

Thanks to Optimus, the power concerns which  were once a major factor in having a dedicated GPU have closed in many systems.

When comparing overall notebook performance of an Intel Core i5 system with integrated graphics to a system with an Intel Core i5 processor and a GeForce GT420M GPU NVIDIA found increased performance in four categories.

  • Editing HD Video – 3x Faster – while using CyberLink PowerDirector
  • Retouching photos – 5x Faster – using Photoshop running Beauty Box
  • Web Photo Browsing – 50% faster – FPS on IE 9 viewing Flickr Preview.
  • Gaming – 5X Faster – Frames Per Second on StarCraft II vat 16×10 on medium settings.

Combine all of these activities together and the time savings from a faster system can quickly add up.

What notebooks will use the GeForce 400M GPUs?

NVIDIA didn’t announce specific notebooks will come with the new GeForce 400M GPUs today but they did release that six out of seven OEM manufacturers will have at least one Optimus notebook running a 400M series GPU during the 2010 Holiday Season.

What about 3D ?

NVIDIA also announced that the following 400M series GPUs will support 3D Vision and 3DTVPlay – GeForce GTX 480M, GTX 470M, GTX 460M, GT 445M, GT 435M, and GT 425.

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