GTX 780M vs 880M

Just as the rumors and promises of soon-to-be processors that Intel was supposedly dreaming up have long fuelled heated debate and captured interest in the tech community, the conjecture and comparison of graphic cards is one of the most important points to consider when planning for a new computer.

As the NVIDIA corporation heralds the launch of a new collection of graphics cards (bumping up to “800” from the already-robust “700” line) we here at ProStar have commemorated the event by delving into the performance of the mighty 780M and 880M cards, both of which are the top-of-the line in their respective series.

When it arrived, the GeForce GTX 780M was touted by NVIDIA to be “up to fifty percent” faster than last generation’s model and feature “more cores than ever.” At the time, in the summer of 2013, the 780M was hailed as the “fastest notebook GPU ever.”

Now, the 800M series is here to play and it is certainly ahead of the curve compared to the 780M, but to understand how the passé stacks up against the nouveau, let’s first take a peek at how the design of the 780M was conceived.
Starting with the 680mx chip as its inspiration, NVIDIA went under the hood to turn what was certainly a capable sedan into a souped-up roadster.

The powerhouse that would become the 780M was first clocked up to a higher frequency (a core speed rated at 823MHz) and the number of CUDA cores was upped from 1344 to 1536. The finished product featured an available 4GB of GDDR5 memory, almost exactly double that of the 680mx. Finally, the thermal design power, or TDP (which relates to the maximum amount of heat that a processor would theoretically generate while running applications) was improved to help ensure a performance boost over the older graphics units when running under stress and higher temperatures.

NVIDIA also utilized its “GPU Boost 2.0” to automatically overclock the GPU and, depending on the amount of heat the graphics card could safely produce, NVIDIA theorized that increases in performance of up to 15% would be possible.

Now we know a little more about NVIDIA’s formula for producing their flagships: select a worthy candidate from the current line as a starting point, do a little surgery, add a little innovation and crown the result as the next stage of GPU transcendence.

As anyone in the market for a new laptop is sure to know, the 880M is out and about in the world and, true to form, NVIDIA has created this hopped-up monster by improving on their last cherished pinnacle of notebook empowerment: none other than the 780M.
Following their previous formula, NVIDIA targeted their favorite areas of the GPU for improvement. The core clock speed was upped to 954MHz from the previous 823 and the amount of available GDDR5 memory, again, just about doubled from the previous 4 to a whopping 8GB.

The number of CUDA cores on the new 880M remained the same, but NVIDIA chose to showcase features such as Battery Boost (to provide longer life while playing games away from the plug), in-game recording through the Shadowplay feature and the ability to stream PC games on NVIDIA’s new Shield console.

Both the 780M and the 880M use the same architecture, called Kepler, but the remarkable tweaking and boosting NVIDIA has done using the same platform as the 780M has yielded a much more potent card. The resulting incarnation of graphics processing prowess opens up a considerable gap between the 700 and 800 series flagships.

According to NVIDIA’s own benchmarks running a simple frames per second (FPS) test on various games, the 880M attains anywhere from of 5 to 25 better FPS on the various titles tested than the 780M of yore. Though most titles tested did not show that maximum 25 FPS increase, the jump of about 10 FPS in average performance is, to say the least, significant.

Notebookcheck’s exhaustive performance testing with a wide array of benchmarking tools including 3DMark, Cinebench, GFX Bench and Unigine revealed an average performance gain of about 10% in the 880M over the 780M. This might sound slight at first, but the consistent improvement that the 880M shows over such a wide array of tests is, again, impressive especially considering that this shares its architecture with the 780M.

All in all, NVIDIA has managed once again to set the bar at an impressive level. The corporation is hard at work on new architecture for their upcoming models, but the 800m series and its king, the 880M, will be at the pinnacle of mobile gaming graphics for the foreseeable future.

With great excitement, ProStar computers has introduced the 880M into its newest line of computers. The heavyweight champion of mobile graphics processing has been made available in all of ProStar’s gaming series (in addition to a vast array of other graphics cards) and can now be ordered on:

For more specifications and detailed information on these high-performance gaming and professional machines, please visit our site or give one of our wonderful sales representatives a call. For every one of our units, navigating to the More Info link provided on our company site provides a detailed description of the computer and its capabilities as well as image galleries, specifications and customization options.
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