Nvidia launches GeForce 9 mGPU chipsets

Posted at: 2:00pm 15th October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

The chipset from the new Apple MacBooks comes to the desktop, offering HD video acceleration, CUDA support and 3D gaming

Less than a day after Apple revealed that it’s using a new Nvidia chipset with integrated graphics in its latest MacBooks, Nvidia has now announced the desktop version of the chipset for PC motherboards. The new chipset aims to trample on Intel’s stronghold in the integrated graphics business, as Nvidia is claiming that ‘good enough is no longer good enough.’

This is where the new GeForce 9 series of 9300 and 9400 mGPUs come in, offering faster gaming performance, HD video features and CUDA support for PhysX and GPU acceleration. Nvidia claims that the GeForce 9400 mGPU can score P575 in 3DMark Vantage, which it says is double that of the 262 from AMD’s 790GX chipset, and over five times the score of Intel’s G45 chipset.

That said, 575 is still a rubbish score, but Nvidia claims that the 9300 mGPU GPU can also get an average of 30fps in a number of top games at minimum settings, including Crysis, Bioshock and Call of Duty 4. You might have to drop the settings, but the games will at least be playable. This, says Nvidia, is a vast improvement over what you get from Intel’s integrated graphics. Nvidia claims that Intel’s integrated graphics fail or have issues on 47 per cent of the current top 30 games, and the company has also released comparative screenshots of Intel integrated graphics versus Nvidia integrated graphics (pictured) to illustrate some of the issues.

Both mGPUs have 16 stream processors, but they differ in clock speed. The 9300 has a core clock of 450MHz, with 1.2GHz stream processors, while the 9400 gas a 580MHz core clock and 1.4GHz stream processors. With just 16 stream processors, the new chipsets’ gaming performance isn’t going to appeal to gaming enthusiasts but they should at least mean that games work on budget PCs with integrated graphics, which is a major problem with Intel’s integrated graphics.

Plus, if CUDA really takes off in a big way, then you’ll automatically have more processing power from your chipset too. You can also boost the graphics performance using Hybrid SLI, slotting in an 8400 GS or 8500 GT card to boost the frame rate.

The mGPUs also feature HD video acceleration for H.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1 Codecs. Nvidia claims that this will drop CPU utilisation during HD video playback to around 15 per cent when using a Pentium Dual-Core E2180, and just 4 per cent with an E8400. The chipset also features 7.1 audio over HDCP, and support for DisplayPort, HDMI, dual-link DVI and VGA interfaces. This could make the boards appealing for use in low-cost, low-noise media centre PCs.

Several companies have already announced micro-ATX motherboards based on the technology, including Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. The new boards support LGA775 processors with an FSB of up to 1,333MHz, and the chipset can support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory. Could Nvidia’s new mGPUs threaten Intel when it comes to integrated graphics? Let us know your thoughts.