The IGP Chronicles Part 3: NVIDIA's GeForce 9300
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on October 15, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
A New Graphics Core
With a smaller manufacturing process, NVIDIA could cram more into the GeForce 9300. While the 80nm GeForce 8200 and 8300 featured 8 SPs, the GeForce 9300 and 9400 have twice that: 16 stream processors. Compared to discrete cards this isn't much of course; the table below shows how the GeForce 9300 stacks up to NVIDIA's own discrete solutions:
| NVIDIA GeForce 9300 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 | NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT | NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO | NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT | NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT | |
| Shader Processors | 16 | 192 | 112 |
96 |
32 | 16 |
| Core Clock | 450MHz | 576MHz | 600MHz | 550MHz | 550MHz | 550MHz |
| Shader Clock | 1.2GHz | 1.242GHz | 1.5GHz |
1.375GHz |
1.4GHz | 1.35GHz |
Yeah, integrated graphics still pretty much sucks for any real gaming. What we want is at least 9500 GT class of performance, and what we're getting is something below a 9400 GT (once you factor in memory bandwidth limitations). Compared to other IGPs however, NVIDIA has finally closed the gap between itself and AMD's 780G. Look at the specs:
| AMD 790GX | AMD 780G | Intel G45 | Intel G35 | NVIDIA GeForce 9400 | NVIDIA GeForce 9300 | NVIDIA GeForce 8300 | NVIDIA GeForce 8200 | |
| Graphics | Radeon HD 3300 | Radeon HD 3200 | GMA X4500 |
GMA X3500 |
GeForce 9400 mGPU | GeForce 9300 mGPU | GeForce 8300 mGPU | GeForce 8200 mGPU |
| Core Clock | 700MHz | 500MHz | 800MHz | 667MHz | 580MHz Core / 1.4GHz Shader | 450MHz Core / 1.2GHz Shader | 500MHz Core / 1.5GHz Shader |
500MHz Core / 1.2GHz Shader |
| Shader Processors | 8 (5-way) | 8 (5-way) | 10 |
8 |
16 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
| Full H.264/VC-1/MPEG-2 HW Decode | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
While AMD can crank through a peak of 40 instructions per clock, that's very much a best case scenario figure. NVIDIA should have no problems retiring 16 instructions per clock and with its SPs running at 2.4x the speed of AMD's in the 780G, NVIDIA should not only be able to equal AMD's performance but surpass it in most games.
As we saw with the GeForce 8200 and 8300 series, the only difference between the 9300 and 9400 are clock speeds (450MHz/1.2GHz vs. 580MHz/1.4GHz). And just as we saw with the GeForce 8200/8300, we had no problems overclocking our GeForce 9300 to 9400 clock speeds. The 9300 will be the chipset to look at; the 9400 is simply a way of getting more money out of the consumer.
Dual-Link DVI is supported so 2560x1600 is available... but only if the board manufacturer supports it. The ASUS board we tested with does not support DL DVI unfortunately. DisplayPort and standard VGA are also supported, making for a very nice array of output options on the I/O plane:
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yehuda - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Thanks Anand and Gary for all your work on this article. Do you know if the Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H board is coming out with the others?kevinkreiser - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Where's the discussion about hybrid-sli drivers/benchmarks? A follow-up article with the tests still in progress?This german review has hybrid-sli benchmarks but they omit a discussion about drivers or even how you set it up, they just show numbers.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/mainbo...">http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hard...schnitt_...
kevinkreiser - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Wait my mistake, actually the german article mentions in the conclusion that they experienced bugginess with the hybrid-sli driver and sometimes games don't start or run really slow. Any comments from you guys at anandtech?Visual - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Does nVidia intend to have this GPU on an AMD chipset at all, or have they given up competing there?Can we expect this chipset to be used in Intel laptops (other than Apple), and will they still get the Centrino brand? If Intel insists on requiring their own chipsets for that brand, I'm afraid laptop manufacturers will not use it despite its obvious advantages.
Does something like hybrid-SLI work on this chipset, to get better performance from a 9400/9500/9600GT card?
From the Apple adverts it seems dynamic switching between the IGP and stand-alone GPU will be a reality in its laptops... is that the case also with the desktop version that you test today? I guess you'd have mentioned it if it were... Is it at least planned with future drivers or something?
R3MF - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Good point about the Centrino brand, that may well make laptop manufacturers wary of this chipset, just because of the power of the Centrino brand.On the other hand, this may be a very good reason for nVidia to push the Via Nano netbook platform via big companies like HP which have a strong brand quality of their own.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
The Hybrid Power tech (switching between IGP and discrete GPU) should be available in this chipset; support for the feature still remains with the motherboard/notebook vendors, however. I'm still waiting for my first Windows notebook to feature hybrid power (which is also available with G45 chipsets... though why you'd want G45 over GF9300 is a tough question to answer; oh, right: Centrino 2!) You're right: Centrino as a brand is so powerful that NVIDIA can have the best solution in every way and still not see much uptake. We'll have to see how it goes....danielgr - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
It's funny... it seems that it's always the same, and Apple has to introduce something for people to get to know it...Sony has been selling "hybrid-power" laptops for about 2 years now... (here is an old laptop running Intel's 965GM chipset with NVIDIA 8400M graphics and "the magic switch"), together with LED displays, SSD drives...
Their current offer gets you Centrino2+DDR3, BD, Raid-SSD, HybridStuff with Nvidia 9300M GS on Intel's GM45, Wide Gammut LED display, and still weights around 1.5Kg with 7.5-11h of autonomy...
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/feat1.html">http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/Z1/feat1.html
danielgr - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
Forgot the link to the "old_laptop":http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/SZ6/feat2.html">http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/SZ6/feat2.html
Gary Key - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
We will be updating the article shortly. It has been an all night meeting marathon with the motherboard suppliers and NVIDIA trying to get answers on the AHCI problems, memory performance, and other minor items we discovered. ASUS sent us a new BIOS that we will test in a couple of hours, the AHCI problems have diminished greatly after yet another clean install of Vista SP1 (still have some minor pauses during heavy drive load), and we feel safe enough in taking a detailed look at the motherboards in a couple of days.That said, NVIDIA surprised us with this chipset, probably the best one (all around) on the market for HTPC setups and casual gaming performance now. That is not to take anything away from the AMD platforms, personally I am running a 8750 and GF8200 hooked up to a new 52" LCD, if the price was right, the 9350e is a really sweet processor that will greatly lower power requirements on the AMD side, as we will see next week. Hopefully, AMD will respond with multi-channel LPCM output in their IG chipset. If that is not important, the 780g/790GX is great. ;)
Zstream - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
30% cpu utilization for a HTPC is good? Umm, I guess I come from a different perspective then.Quite a few HTPC's are for streaming, so with this chipset it is almost impossible to stream data while watching what you are streaming.
Did I misunderstand something here or what?