A Look at NVIDIA’s GeForce 800M Mobile GPU Series

NVIDIA’s GeForce 800M mobile series brings the usual performance upgrades that a generational gap usually entails, but it’s with the features it brings that makes me feel like this is one of the most important mobile GPU launches to happen in a while. Read on to learn about them all, and to get a preview of 800M-equipped notebooks.

With NVIDIA’s GeForce 820M having popped-up last month, we knew that the rest of the 800M models would soon follow – and, given the fact that this article exists, you’d be correct in guessing that it’s just happened.

As a bottom-of-the-ladder part, the GeForce 820M told us the grand sum of nothing about what we could have expected to see from the higher-end models. In fact, its base GK117 architecture has been used on the lowest-end mobile parts dating back a couple of generations, so in all regards, it’s not that interesting. The same could be said about the 830M and 840M; neither are targeted at gamers, although they’re at least based on Maxwell, the same architecture utilized on the excellent GeForce GTX 750 and 750 Ti desktop parts (which I took an in-depth look at).

Of today’s launch models, then, the interesting parts are the 850M (based on Maxwell), and the 860M, 870M, and 880M, all based on Kepler. At the moment, it appears NVIDIA’s more interested in using Maxwell on the low-end, whereas the high-performing Kepler retains its place at the top-tier of the current lineup.

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