The IGP Chronicles Part 3: NVIDIA's GeForce 9300
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on October 15, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
A New Graphics Core
With a smaller manufacturing process, NVIDIA could cram more into the GeForce 9300. While the 80nm GeForce 8200 and 8300 featured 8 SPs, the GeForce 9300 and 9400 have twice that: 16 stream processors. Compared to discrete cards this isn't much of course; the table below shows how the GeForce 9300 stacks up to NVIDIA's own discrete solutions:
| NVIDIA GeForce 9300 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 | NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT | NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO | NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT | NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT | |
| Shader Processors | 16 | 192 | 112 |
96 |
32 | 16 |
| Core Clock | 450MHz | 576MHz | 600MHz | 550MHz | 550MHz | 550MHz |
| Shader Clock | 1.2GHz | 1.242GHz | 1.5GHz |
1.375GHz |
1.4GHz | 1.35GHz |
Yeah, integrated graphics still pretty much sucks for any real gaming. What we want is at least 9500 GT class of performance, and what we're getting is something below a 9400 GT (once you factor in memory bandwidth limitations). Compared to other IGPs however, NVIDIA has finally closed the gap between itself and AMD's 780G. Look at the specs:
| AMD 790GX | AMD 780G | Intel G45 | Intel G35 | NVIDIA GeForce 9400 | NVIDIA GeForce 9300 | NVIDIA GeForce 8300 | NVIDIA GeForce 8200 | |
| Graphics | Radeon HD 3300 | Radeon HD 3200 | GMA X4500 |
GMA X3500 |
GeForce 9400 mGPU | GeForce 9300 mGPU | GeForce 8300 mGPU | GeForce 8200 mGPU |
| Core Clock | 700MHz | 500MHz | 800MHz | 667MHz | 580MHz Core / 1.4GHz Shader | 450MHz Core / 1.2GHz Shader | 500MHz Core / 1.5GHz Shader |
500MHz Core / 1.2GHz Shader |
| Shader Processors | 8 (5-way) | 8 (5-way) | 10 |
8 |
16 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
| Full H.264/VC-1/MPEG-2 HW Decode | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
While AMD can crank through a peak of 40 instructions per clock, that's very much a best case scenario figure. NVIDIA should have no problems retiring 16 instructions per clock and with its SPs running at 2.4x the speed of AMD's in the 780G, NVIDIA should not only be able to equal AMD's performance but surpass it in most games.
As we saw with the GeForce 8200 and 8300 series, the only difference between the 9300 and 9400 are clock speeds (450MHz/1.2GHz vs. 580MHz/1.4GHz). And just as we saw with the GeForce 8200/8300, we had no problems overclocking our GeForce 9300 to 9400 clock speeds. The 9300 will be the chipset to look at; the 9400 is simply a way of getting more money out of the consumer.
Dual-Link DVI is supported so 2560x1600 is available... but only if the board manufacturer supports it. The ASUS board we tested with does not support DL DVI unfortunately. DisplayPort and standard VGA are also supported, making for a very nice array of output options on the I/O plane:
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XavierJohn - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
I switched from a Pioneer Elite to Integra DHC-9.9 and to me it seems like the Pioneer sounds better. Pioneer during its speaker setup also setup EQ to compensate for room modes. I did not see Integra do that.XavierJohn - Friday, October 17, 2008 - link
I wish you said atleast one sentence on why you would go from Pioneer to DTC 9.8.Better sound?
BikeDude - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
I have never fully understood "PureVideo". It is my understanding that this is only supported by a handful few players, like the awfully buggy PowerDVD that simply won't run on my system (PowerDVD no longer support SCSI DVD-ROM).Atechie - Friday, October 17, 2008 - link
Funny, Windows Media Player and PureVideo works fine for me?iwodo - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
The performance for Ethernet CPU usage seems rather poor. In fact all of them are bad, as Intel should be in the region of single digit percentage shown in other website.One interesting point i realize while reading, i hope to share with their reader.
Is that measuring the few percentage difference with low CPU resoource usage playing H.264 Full HD isn't very important at all... Why?
Because the difference between 15 - 25% , while 10% looks like a lot, the most important factor is POWER CONSUMPTION. While most people would think lower CPU usage and therefore lower power usage. In this article it turns out while Geforce has the lowest power consumption while using most CPU resources.
And how many people use their CPU for other heavy task while watching Full HD Movie?
I cant wait to see these being refreshed next summer, with 40nm, more die space because memory and most northbridge move to CPU, we should be able to put more then double the shader inside?
crabnebula - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
I know the focus is on Blu-ray and progressive source material, but most people stil have SD DVDs and 1080i TV broadcasts that they want to play back on their HTPC.Adequate deinterlacing, detail enhancement and noise reduction have been the missing pieces of the puzzle for all other IGPs except the 780G + Phenom combination, but that has other issues.
What about the 9300/9400? Does the increased GPU power allow for better processing?
If it doesn't, there is one other check missing on your list, in my opinion.
Natfly - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
So is this the article that was supposed to come out analyzing the 780G, 8200, and G45? You know, months.... and months.... and months ago? I'm glad you guys waited until nVidia released a competative product before releasing this article. Otherwise I would have bought a 780G motherboard months ago.AmdInside - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
I wish you guys wouldn't use the Sony BDU-X10S in your testing. I've owned this drive and it just sucks. Had problems on both Intel and NVIDIA chipsets.As for the data transferring problem, I had the same problem recently on my Badaxe2 motherboard. I was moving my hard drive from my Geforce 8200 system to Intel G45 system but first needed to copy recordings to another hard drive so that I could format the hard drive. My desktop has a Badaxe2 is running Vista x64 and I too randomly experienced pauses when copying 500GB of data. Not sure if it is related but it might just be a Vista thing.
Badkarma - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Hi Anand/Gary,In your next installment, can you please find the slowest usable CPU that plays Bluray smoothly and also test Speedstep with it? Using a quadcore is really overkill and kind of defeats the purpose of GPU DXVA. The 8200 w/ a 4850e cannot utilize CnQ to playback BR. I'd like to see whether a 9300 w/ E5200 or E7200 and Speedstep enabled can play BR smoothly.
Thanks.
sonicology - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Nice LL Cool J reference in the article description!