Nvidia Crams 16 Cores into Integrated GPUs

The company's new 9-Series mGPUs bring performance closer to its discrete performance GPUs, in a budget package that's one half the size.

Nvidia may be best known for its watt-sucking, heat-blasting, enthusiast-oriented graphics cards, but the company isn’t completely averse to throwing Joe Consumer a bone now and then either. On Monday, the company unveiled its latest integrated graphics solution, the 9-Series mGPU, which borrows some DNA from its older brothers to keep give a boost to 3D and video performance.

The GeForce 9400 and 9300 motherboard GPUs both feature 16-core CUDA architecture to perform the same kind of parallel processing going on in Nvidia’s high-performance discrete cards, but in a package Nvidia claims is literally one half the size. The result: better 3D acceleration, support for both DirectX 10 and PhysX-accelerated games, plus HD video processing that offloads 100% of the job from the CPU.

“We’ve combined the power of three different chips into one highly compact and efficient GPU,” said Drew Henry, general manager of MCP business unit at Nvidia, in a statement. “In doing so, we’ve redefined the level of performance people can expect from a motherboard solution to enrich visual computing experiences for mainstream systems. You can now have the performance of a discrete GPU in a small form factor PC.”

Both of the new 9-Series chipsets will begin shipping this month on motherboards from companies including Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI.