Nvidia seems to be undergoing a refresh cycle on the mobility side of things because a report from NotebookCheck indicates that new versions of the Geforce 920M, Geforce 930M and Geforce 940M are in the pipeline. The new generation will be donated by an additional ‘X’ suffix so that the nomenclature becomes Geforce 920MX, Geforce 930MX and Geforce 940MX respectively. The primary difference between the two generations (known so far) will be optional GDDR5 support present with MX series GPUs.
Nvidia refreshing low to mainstream Geforce Mobility lineup with new chips and GDDR5 memory support
The new chips will arrive in the first few months of 2016 and will be more efficient revisions of the same chips. The codenames are N16V-GMR, N16S-GMR and N16S-GTR respectively for the 920MX, 930MX and 940MX. It’s worth adding that even though we won’t be seeing an increase in core count or a different architecture the inclusion of GDDR5 support will result in significantly increased performance. This can be as high as ~20% in some cases. Note for eg that the GDDR5 version of the current Geforce 940M in the Surface Book can make as much as a ~20% difference compared to its DDR3 version.
Benchmark and Picture Courtesy of NotebookCheck
Take for example the benchmark above, showcasing a DDR3 based Geforce 940M and a GDDR5 1 GB Geforce 940M. The difference in memory results in an easy 24% performance boost in Bioshock Infinite. Naturally this is something that will vary across games, still, the performance boost from the memory upgrade is very much real. The wattage of these chips will be around 15-25W. There is also a low power version of the Geforce 930MX present which will sip only 5-12W depending on the scenario and is code named N16S-LP.
The architecture of the Geforce 920M, and, Geforce 930M and Geforce 940M, was Kepler and Maxwell 1.0 respectively. A cut variant of the GK108 is found in the Geforce 920M whileas the GM108 chip can be found in Geforce 930M and 940M. Interestingly, the source mentions that this time around, even the Geforce 920MX will be Maxwell, which raises an interesting possibility. Remember the story that revealed Nvidia is running out of Maxwell 1.0 chips? Well, if that is true than these new GPUs could very well be on Maxwell 2.0. Which would mean a slight increase in IPC as well with the same core count.
It would also mean that these chips support DirectX 12 to a much greater degree (upto feature level 12_1 as opposed to feature level 12_0). They will also support encoding resolutions at 1440p/60FPS & 4K/60FPS compared to Maxwell 1.0 architecture which only supported H.264 1080p/60FPS encoding. Full fixed function HEVC hardware based decoding should also now be supported.. HDMI 2.0 will also be fully supported. New technologies such as Dynamic Super Resolution, Third Generation Delta Color Compression, Multi-Pixel Programming Sampling, Nvidia VXGI (Real-Time-Voxel-Global Illumination), VR Direct, and Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-Aliasing(MFAA) were recently introduced and should be fully compatible with the new chips.
