The chip scored 5,339 points in 3DMark 11, making it better than GTX 770M

Mar 5, 2014 15:03 GMT  ·  By

The GeForce GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti graphics cards are the only two products currently up for sale that are based on the NVIDIA Maxwell graphics processing unit architecture. Soon, though, the GeForce 800M series of mobile GPUs will be updated, and one of the chips has been benchmarked.

NVIDIA seems particularly prone towards premature benchmarks this week. Or perhaps we should say that some of its products are thus.

Just a short time ago, the 64-Bit Dual-Core NVIDIA Tegra K1 Project Denver was benchmarked, and now the GeForce GTX 860M has followed suit.

Although the benchmarks used in each case are different. For Tegra K1 it was AnTuTu, for Maxwell GeForce GTX 860M is was the 3DMark 11 suite.

It's not really clear when the Maxwell-based mobile GeForce 800M series will come out. “Soon” is all we know.

So maybe new notebooks featuring the chips, 860M or some other, will appear in a week, maybe it will take two, or three, maybe two months.

The new benchmark suggests that it will happen sooner rather than later though, and this will give people something to look forward to, if nothing else.

The test results in 3DMark 11 show that the score was of 5,339 points, which is a performance level above that of the GeForce GTX 770M.

That puts the 860M somewhere between the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Ti Boost and the AMD Radeon R7 260X.

The Extreme profile preset showed a score lower than for the GeForce GTX 770M though. Fortunately, not by much.

As for the specifications of the GTX 860M, they aren't revealed by the benchmark. Fortunately, a GPU-Z screenshot was included, which reveals the 640 CUDA cores, 40 TMUs (texture mapping units), 16 ROPs (raster operating units), 3 GB of GDDR5 VRAM (5 GHz clock), and a memory interface of 192 bits.

The graphics processing unit seems to run at 540 MHz, which might seem like little before you remember that this is a mobile GPU so it's supposed to be slower, because it needs to make do with a lower TDP (thermal design power).

So while, physically, the chip has all the same endowments as the GM107 featured in the desktop GeForce GTX 750 Ti video adapter, it can't run at the same performance level. And in all honesty, it's not all that necessary.

See below for all the benchmark results, as revealed by the folks at NotebookReview. You get some GeForce GTX 660M and GTX 770M results for comparison too.

3DMark 11 test results (5 Images)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860MNVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M
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