14 DAY TRIAL // The Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, is playing host to many products and technologies, but curiously enough, graphics products have been underrepresented. Even the release of the GeForce GTX 965M only compounds the problem.
The GeForce GTX 965M is the latest mobile graphics processing unit from NVIDIA, but it ultimately doesn't bring anything new to the table.
This isn't even a grand official announcement, since NVIDIA chose to quietly introduce the chip instead, as part of OEM laptops. There was no press release.
Kind of disheartening really, that even the worldwide consumer technology trade show wasn't enough for AMD and NVIDIA to introduce their next generation technologies.
Well, barring the Tegra X1 from the latter, but that's an SoC, not a GPU or graphics card, and it's a 20nm chip, not 28nm or 16nm as the next video products are supposed to be.
Still, while neither NVIDIA nor Advanced Micro Devices are yet in a position to launch new video products, the former, at least, isn't letting the show go by without a contribution.
The GeForce GTX 965M mobile Maxwell GPU
Seen in the attached photos, this is a mainstream chip for notebooks, insofar as any laptops with discrete graphics can even be considered mainstream now.
With all Intel and AMD CPUs and APUs featuring integrated graphics, the low end and mid-range of the laptop front, like the desktop front for that matter, do not use discrete GPUs at all.
That means that even the weakest notebook GPU has better than average specifications, as only upper mainstream and high-end laptops will be willing to add to the price in exchange for the video performance edge.
Sure enough, the GeForce GTX 965M based on GM204 GPU uses 1,024 CUDA processors and has a base clock of 944 MHz, an unspecified Boost clock (GPU Boost is definitely in play though) and a 128-bit memory interface (2.5 GHz clock). The memory bandwidth is of 80 GB/s.
Compared to the GeForce GTX 980M, which has 1,536 processors, 1,038 MHz and 4 GB of GDDR5 working at 2.5 GHz over 256-bit interface (memory bandwidth of 160 GB/s), the new member of the GTX 900M series isn't half bad.
Availability and pricing
They haven't been revealed, not that we expected it, seeing as how NVIDIA technically didn't shout from the rooftops about the chip's existence itself. OEMs do have laptops at CES 2015 though, so retail availability shouldn't be too far.
