NVIDIA makes GeForce 9400M official for all

Following an introduction along with Apple's new MacBook range, NVIDIA this morning formally announced the GeForce 9400M for all notebook manufacturers. The chipset is one of the first to merge both a full mainboard chipset, including memory and bus controllers, with a truly modern graphics core: it includes 16 graphics processors, or twice that of the GeForce 9300M and other dedicated mobile GPUs that also consume double the space on size-sensitive notebook mainboards.

The video hardware maker additionally transfers Apple's claims of 5X speed gains over Intel graphics to the Windows environment. Running the synthetic benchmark 3D Mark Vantage delivers a similar five-fold performance gain even over the GMA 4500MHD video used in many pure Centrino 2 notebooks, NVIDIA claims.

As part of the 9-series family, it further supports all of the company's in-house feature list, including Shader Model 4 visual effects, full hardware HD video decoding, CUDA general-purpose computing and related features such as PhysX. Hybrid SLI, which switches to and from the 9400M and a discrete graphics chip to manage battery life, is likewise key and forms an essential feature of the MacBook Pro.

The 9400M should be available immediately in all of Apple's new MacBook models, but significantly hasn't been attached to other notebook makers through the NVIDIA announcement. Apple isn't believed to have exclusive access to the 9400M but is also thought to have enforced NVIDIA's secrecy up until Tuesday's MacBook launch, preventing other companies from launching their own notebooks until now.

Filed under: computers, digital imaging, Apple
Other story tags: Intel, MacBook, NVIDIA, GeForce, Centrino 2