Nvidia geforce 9400m graphics processor: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M G Specs

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IndexThe NVIDIA Move: The GeForce 9400MTwo GPUsBaby Steps: The New TrackpadOh No, It’s GlossyDisplay Analysis IndoorsMy Biggest Gripe: No Standard SSDsThe New MacBookThe New MacBook ProPerformanceGPU Accelerated H.264 DecodeBattery Life: Take Two Steps Forward, and Two Steps BackThe Unexpected: Battery Life in OS X vs. Windows VistaFinal Words

The NVIDIA Move: The GeForce 9400M

Every now and then some interesting hardware stuff happens in the Apple world and I get all excited because I get to merge Apple coverage with PC hardware coverage; yippee.

For the uninitiated here’s a quick rundown of the basic silicon in a computer: you’ve got a CPU, a GPU, I/O and main memory, and they all need to talk to one another. The role of the chipset is to provide some basic logic for all of these parts to communicate with one another:

Over time, more and more functionality got integrated into the chipset. Sound, video and ethernet are all part of any modern day chipset. In some cases the chipset is a combination of two chips and in others it’s all one single chip.

NVIDIA used to brand its chipsets nForce and its graphics processors GeForce. When AMD bought ATI, NVIDIA realized it needed to strengthen its chipset brand so it began calling both its chipsets and graphics processors GeForce. Starting at the beginning of 2008, all NVIDIA chipsets included integrated graphics so the GeForce brand was justified.

The GeForce 9400M is the mobile variant of the GeForce 9400 chipset, which just launched last week. It’s a single chip chipset with integrated graphics, giving it an inherent advantage over Intel’s solution: it requires less motherboard real estate.

Intel’s G35, which was used in the previous generation MacBook and MacBook Pro is composed of the G35 GMCH and the ICH9M. The GMCH was built on a 90nm process while the ICH was actually built on a 130nm process. The chips worked just fine but they consumed too much power and took up much more real estate on the motherboard. In a desktop that’s not a problem, but in a notebook you’re more space constrained.

NVIDIA’s chipset reduces the size of the motherboard but it also reduces power consumption. Intel’s G35 was built on a 90nm and 130nm process as I just mentioned; while G45 is built on 65nm for the GMCH, the ICH is still 130nm (not 90nm as I originally assumed). NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M is a 65nm chip; with good power management it should be similar in power consumption to G45 if not lower.

NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M is smaller, consumes less power than G35 and at worst the same amount of power as G45, but on top of all of that it’s a lot faster than anything Intel has to offer. Take a look at this chart from last week’s GeForce 9300 review:

The GeForce 9400M is far from a hardcore gaming GPU; you can’t run most new games at high quality settings and get smooth frame rates, but older games will actually run relatively well on this thing. A bunch of us still play Command & Conquer 3, and instead of setting up a bunch of systems we just game on laptops. The system requirements aren’t tremendous but playing on anything with G35/G45 isn’t exactly satisfying; the GeForce 9400M is enough to make that game look decent and play okay. And herein lies the biggest upgrade to the new MacBook and MacBook Pro: if you happen to have Windows loaded on these machines, the gaming performance of the integrated graphics is much improved. These aren’t gaming machines but they are much better than before for less stressful titles. I’d suggest looking at the GeForce 9300 review for a good idea of where NVIDIA’s gaming performance stands but you’re basically looking at playability at 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 depending on the detail settings of whatever title you’re playing.

Faster Exposé and Coverflow?

The GeForce 9400M, like Intel’s GMA X3100 (the graphics core used in the previous generation MacBook), has no local framebuffer — instead it relies on carving out a portion of your system memory to use for its own needs. The GeForce 9400M uses the chipset’s dual-channel DDR3-1066 memory controller, yielding around 17.1GB/s of memory bandwidth compared to the 10.7GB/s offered by the previous generation’s dual-channel DDR2-667 memory controller.

GPU accelerated features of OS X such as Exposé and Coverflow aren’t particularly processing power constrained as they ran just fine on the GMA X3100 used in the older MacBooks; memory bandwidth actually matters more here. Exposé feels slightly faster with 20 open windows on the new MacBook than on the old one; the animation is a tad smoother. The issue here is that the MacBook’s resolution hasn’t gone up, it’s still stuck at 1280 x 800 — meaning the memory bandwidth requirements for smooth Exposé and Coverflow haven’t changed. The same is true for things like Coverflow; at best it’s marginally faster on the new MacBook.

Moving up to 40 windows, the gap between the GMA X3100 and the GeForce 9400M remains small but noticeable. But crank it up to 60 open windows and Exposé stutters on the GMA X3100 while it’s still fairly smooth on the GeForce 9400M. I suspect this may be due to the 9400M having 256MB of system memory set aside for it compared to 144MB by the GMA X3100, although both should be able to grow their memory partition as needed without incurring a terrible penalty.

At 80 windows the GMA X3100 is unbearable when activating Exposé and both the MacBook’s GeForce 9400M and the Pro’s GeForce 9600M get choppy, but nowhere near as bad as the Intel solution. The 512MB GeForce 9600M will probably do a bit better with 80 windows but at 60 or less both of the NVIDIA solutions do well. With only a few windows open it’s tough to tell the difference between the NVIDIA GPUs and the previous generation Intel offering, but keep a bunch of things open and you’ll quickly appreciate the new mGPU.

Index
Two GPUs
IndexThe NVIDIA Move: The GeForce 9400MTwo GPUsBaby Steps: The New TrackpadOh No, It’s GlossyDisplay Analysis IndoorsMy Biggest Gripe: No Standard SSDsThe New MacBookThe New MacBook ProPerformanceGPU Accelerated H. 264 DecodeBattery Life: Take Two Steps Forward, and Two Steps BackThe Unexpected: Battery Life in OS X vs. Windows VistaFinal Words

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Review: White MacBook 2GHz with Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics

Reviews

By James Galbraith

Macworld Feb 11, 2009 6:00 am PST

At a Glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• Greatly improved graphics power
• Full-size keyboard
• Bright display

Cons

• No video adapters or Apple Remote in the box. CPU speed is slightly slower than previous white MacBook model

Our Verdict

In January 2009, Apple updated its entry-level MacBook to improve the graphics while maintain the same sub-$1,000 price tag. While the Nvidia GeForce 9400M still shares its memory with the system RAM, there’s a lot more memory to share (256MB instead of the 144MB the old integrated Intel graphics had at its disposal). The machine also ships with 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB. The processor has been bumped down to 2GHz from 2.1GHz, but the system bus is faster.

While Apple’s
MacBook ( ) and
MacBook Pro ( ) laptops have been re-engineered to include an all-aluminum unibody design, one lone plastic—err, I mean polycarbonate—model remains. With its
recent internal updates, the $999 white MacBook 2GHz is a better all around system than the white MacBook it replaces.

Externally identical to the last white MacBook, the new 2GHz model has the same number of peripheral connections (a pair of USB 2.0 ports and a single FireWire 400 port) and keeps the same mini-DVI port, as opposed to the new
Mini DisplayPort connector found on the rest of Apple’s current laptops. The new white MacBook also continues to offer the same glossy, 1,280-by-800 pixel display, the same 120GB Serial ATA hard drive, and still weighs in at 5 pounds, a half-pound more than its aluminum-clad siblings.

The $999 2GHz MacBook features faster graphics performance, thanks to the new Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics subsystem.

Under the hood, however, there are a few welcome changes. The biggest change is the inclusion of the Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphic subsystem, a major upgrade over the Intel GMA X3100 used previously. Like the X3100, the 9400M is an integrated graphics chip that shares its memory with main memory. The 9400M uses 256MB of memory, a boost over the 144MB used by the X3100. The second update is a doubling of the RAM—the entry level MacBook ships with 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, compared to just 1GB of the same type of memory in the previous version. The latest white MacBook also has a faster front side bus, now running at 1,066MHz instead of 800MHz before. Interestingly, though, the new processor runs at 2GHz, a wee bit slower than the last generation’s 2.1GHz processor.

MacBook 2GHz (white) Speedmark scores

Longer bars are better. Blue bars in italics represent reference systems. Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith, Chris Holt, and Jerry Jung.

What do these changes mean in terms of speed improvement? In overall performance, the differences were as subtle as you’d expect, with the new white MacBook getting a nearly four percent higher score than the previous white MacBook in our system performance benchmark
Speedmark 5. In most processor-intensive tests, the new white MacBook is slightly slower than its predecessor, which isn’t surprising, considering that the new white MacBook has a 2GHz processor, compared to the 2.1GHz processor in its predecessor.

But the new white MacBook showed improvement in our 3-D game benchmarks; in fact, the new Nvidia-powered MacBook can display nearly four times as many frames per seconds in our Quake tests as the last generation with its Intel graphics. (Keep in mind that Speedmark requires 2GBs of RAM, so the performance differences would be more pronounced if we tested the older white MacBook with its 1GB of stock RAM.) The new MacBook’s Quake score was 21 percent faster than the high-end, 1.86GHz MacBook Air and 22 percent slower than the next step up the MacBook ladder, the 2GHz aluminum MacBook with its faster, 1,066MHz DDR3 RAM.

The new white MacBook was about five percent slower in our Speedmark 5 tests than the 2GHz aluminum MacBook, but in many tests the results were very close, with the white MacBook even turning in a slightly faster time than its aluminum sibling in a few tests. Against the high-end 1.86GHz MacBook Air, the white MacBook was faster in most of the tests, though the Air’s speedy solid state drive gave the Air an edge in hard disk-intensive tasks.

Apple says the new MacBook’s battery life will last about 4.5 hours, but in our worse-case scenario testing—watching a movie from the hard drive at full screen and full brightness—we got 2 hours and 42 minutes of battery life, about 10 minutes more than with the last generation white MacBook, and about 6 minutes more than the 2GHz aluminum MacBook.

Macworld’s buying advice

As far as system updates go, the changes to new white MacBook are welcome, if subtle. The new faster graphics will make casual gamers happy, and who doesn’t like additional RAM? Though the slightly slower processor didn’t help performance any, this new white MacBook is a solid entry-level product. And if you need a Mac portable with FireWire, it’s your most affordable choice, with the cheapest MacBook Pro costing twice as much as the white MacBook.

[James Galbraith is Macworld’s lab director.]

Video card Nvidia GeForce 9400M — specifications, tests, reviews

• Issue date: October, 2008;
• GPU frequency: 580 MHz.

Specifications Nvidia GeForce 9400M

GPU

Energy consumption

Performance

Number of shaders	16
TMU	8
Number of ROPs	4
Pixel fill rate	2.32GPixel/s
Texture Fill Rate	4. 64 GTexel/s
Number of floating point operations (FLOPS)	44.8GFLOPS

Comparison of GeForce 9400M video card with analogues

Pixel fill rate

The number of pixels that the video card can display on the screen every second

Texture Fill Rate

Rate at which the graphics card renders textures

Number of floating point operations (FLOPS)

Video card calculation speed

GeForce 9400M	44.8GFLOPS
GeForce 320M	91. 2 GFLOPS
GeForce GT 320M	52.8GFLOPS

Number of shader units

Shaders — sub-components of the GPU that work with three-dimensional graphics

Number of texture units (TMUs)

Texture units (TMUs) affect the texture fill rate of a graphics scene

Number of ROPs

GPU components responsible for transform pixels as they flow between memory buffers

Video Reviews

Gaming On A 256Mb Graphics Card!!! | Geforce 9300GE (2018)

Half Life 2 On The Nvidia Geforce 9400m