The GeForce 800M series is a family of

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

s by

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

for laptop PCs. It consists of rebrands of mobile versions of the

GeForce 700 series The GeForce 700 series (stylized as GEFORCE GTX 700 SERIES) is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. While mainly a refresh of the Kepler microarchitecture (GK-codenamed chips), some cards use Fermi (GF) and later cards us ...

and some newer chips that are lower end compared to the rebrands. The GeForce 800 series name was originally planned to be used for both desktop and mobile chips based on the Maxwell microarchitecture (GM-codenamed chips), named after the Scottish theoretical physicist

James Clerk Maxwell James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish mathematician and scientist responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and ligh ...

, which was previously introduced into the

in the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti, released on February 18, 2014. However, because mobile GPUs under the GeForce 800M series had already been released using the

Kepler Johannes Kepler (; ; 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws o ...

architecture, Nvidia decided to rename its GeForce 800 series desktop GPUs as the

GeForce 900 series The GeForce 900 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 700 series and serving as the high-end introduction to the Maxwell microarchitecture, named after James Clerk Maxwell. They are produced ...

. The Maxwell microarchitecture, the successor to Kepler microarchitecture, was the first Nvidia architecture to feature an integrated

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between the ...

CPU of its own.Nvidia Maxwell to be first GPU with ARM CPU in 2013
Guru3d.com This enabled Maxwell GPUs to be more independent from the main CPU according to Nvidia's CEO

Jen-Hsun Huang Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang (; born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese American billionaire business magnate, electrical engineer, and the co-founder, current president and CEO of Nvidia Corporation. Early years and education Huang was born in Tai ...

. Nvidia expects three major things from the Maxwell architecture: improved graphics capabilities, simplified programming, and better energy-efficiency compared to the

and

GeForce 600 series The GeForce 600 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, first released in 2012. They served as the introduction of the Kepler architecture. Overview Where the goal of the previous architecture, Fermi, was to inc ...

Architecture

First generation Maxwell (GM10x)

First generation Maxwell GM107/GM108 provides few consumer-facing additional features; Nvidia instead focused on power efficiency. Nvidia's video encoder, NVENC, is 1.5 to 2 times faster than on Kepler-based GPUs meaning it can encode video at 6 to 8 times playback speed. Nvidia also claims an 8 to 10 times performance increase in

PureVideo PureVideo is Nvidia's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia GPUs, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple video codec standards: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, HEVC, and AV1. PureVideo occu ...

Feature Set E video decoding due to the video decoder cache paired with increases in memory efficiency. However,

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compari ...

is not supported for full hardware decoding, relying on a mix of hardware and software decoding. When decoding video, a new low power state "GC5" is used on Maxwell GPUs to conserve power. Nvidia increased the amount of L2 cache on GM107 to 2 MB, up from 256 KB on GK107, reducing the memory bandwidth needed. Accordingly, Nvidia cut the memory bus to 128 bit on GM107 from 192 bit on GK106, further saving power. Nvidia also changed the streaming multiprocessor design from that of Kepler (SMX), naming it SMM. The layout of SMM units is partitioned so that each of the four

warp scheduler Warp, warped or warping may refer to: Arts and entertainment Books and comics * WaRP Graphics, an alternative comics publisher * Warp (First Comics), ''Warp'' (First Comics), comic book series published by First Comics based on the play ''Warp!'' ...

s controls isolated FP32

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ca ...

cores, load/store units and special function units, unlike Kepler, where the warp schedulers share the resources. Texture units and FP64 CUDA cores are still shared. SMM allows for a finer-grain allocation of resources than SMX, saving power when the workload isn't optimal for shared resources. Nvidia claims a 128 CUDA core SMM has 90% of the performance of a 192 CUDA core SMX. GM107/GM108 supports

Compute Capability 5.0 compared to 3.5 on GK110/GK208 GPUs and 3.0 on GK10x GPUs. Dynamic Parallelism and HyperQ, two features in GK110/GK208 GPUs, are also supported across the entire Maxwell product line. Maxwell provides native shared memory atomic operations for 32-bit integers and native shared memory 32-bit and 64-bit compare-and-swap (CAS), which can be used to implement other atomic functions. Maxwell supports DirectX 12.

Products

Products formerly placed into the GeForce 800 (8xx) series

Nvidia has announced that the company skipped the GeForce 800 series for desktop graphics cards, most likely because the GTX 800M series consists of high-end Kepler and low-end Maxwell based components. Instead, Nvidia had announced that the newly renamed GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 will be introduced formally on September 19, 2014.

GeForce 800M (8xxM) series

The GeForce 800M series is designed for notebooks. The processing power is obtained by multiplying shader clock speed, the number of cores and how many instructions the cores are capable of performing per cycle. Note that all GK104 based GPUs are using the older

Kepler Architecture Kepler is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, first introduced at retail in April 2012, as the successor to the Fermi (microarchitecture), Fermi microarchitecture. Kepler was Nvidia's first microarchitecture to focus on ...

and the 820M uses GF117 cores based on the Fermi Architecture. *¹ Unified Shaders :

Texture mapping unit In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in a ...

s :

Render output unit In computer graphics, the render output unit (ROP) or raster operations pipeline is a hardware component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern graphics cards. The pixel pipelines ...

Successor Architecture

The next generation of mobile cards was the 900M series, which continued usage of the Maxwell archicture. Nvidia followed the Maxwell architecture with the Pascal architecture in 2016 in the

GeForce 10 series The GeForce 10 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, initially based on the Pascal microarchitecture announced in March 2014. This design series succeeded the GeForce 900 series, and is succeeded by the GeForce 16 se ...

Chipset table

Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units This list contains general information about graphics processing units (GPUs) and video cards from Nvidia, based on official specifications. In addition some Nvidia motherboards come with integrated onboard GPUs. Limited/Special/Collectors' Editio ...

Discontinued support

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

32-bit: 368.8
driver download
*

64-bit: 368.8
driver download
Nvidia announced that after Release 390 drivers, it will no longer release 32-bit drivers for 32-bit operating systems. Notebook GPUs based on the Kepler architecture moved to legacy support in April 2019 and will receive critical security updates until April 2020. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 830M, 840M and 850M from the 8xxM GPU family are unaffected by this change. Nvidia announced that after Release 470 drivers, it would transition driver support for the Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 operating systems to legacy status and continue to provide critical security updates for these operating systems through September 2024.

Architecture

First generation Maxwell (GM10x)

Products

Products formerly placed into the GeForce 800 (8xx) series

GeForce 800M (8xxM) series

Successor Architecture

Chipset table

Discontinued support

See also

Notes

References

External links