NVIDIA Unleashes New Mid-range Mobile GPUs: GeForce GTX 950M & 960M

To complement the high-end GeForce GTX 970M and 980M mobile GPUs that have been on the market since the fall, NVIDIA has today released a couple of more affordable options: GTX 960M and 950M.

As you’d expect, these new GPUs are a fair bit slower than the pre-existing high-end chips, but what’s gained is the ability to use NVIDIA’s latest and greatest Maxwell architecture in smaller notebooks (I’ve been testing a 980M-equipped notebook here, and it’s a tank!).

Both the GTX 960M and 950M appear to be the same, just with differing clock speeds. What the table doesn’t show, though, is that the GTX 950M can be configured with DDR3 in lieu of GDDR5. This isn’t a configuration I’d recommend, though, as the memory bandwidth will plummet from 80GB/s to 32GB/s.

Similar to other Maxwell mobile GPUs, these ones support Optimus, ShadowPlay, BatteryBoost, and DirectX 12.

NVIDIA stresses that this isn’t a paper launch, and that models will be available starting today, with vendors including ASUS, Alienware (pictured below), MSI, Razer, HP, Lenovo (also pictured below), Acer, Clevo, GIGABYTE, and “more”.

As of the time of writing, the availability of notebooks featuring these new GPUs is modest from what I can see, but I’d expect that tomorrow, and especially next week, we’ll see a relative explosion of them hit retail.