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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M in 2025: Retrospective and Relevance

The Past and Present of Mobile GPUs for Gamers and Professionals

1. Architecture and Key Features

Based on Kepler: A Legacy from 2014

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M is a mobile graphics card released in 2014, built on the Kepler architecture. It is NVIDIA's second generation of GPUs, optimized for balancing performance and energy efficiency in laptops. The manufacturing process is 28 nm, which seems archaic by today's standards (5-7 nm for the RTX 40 series).

Unique Features for Its Time:

- Support for DirectX 11.2 and OpenGL 4.5 — relevant standards of the era.

- NVIDIA Optimus technology for automatic switching between integrated and discrete graphics.

- PhysX and CUDA for enhanced physics in games and parallel computing.

What the GTX 880M Lacks:

- Ray tracing (RTX) and DLSS — features that only appeared in Turing (2018) and newer.

- Compatibility with DirectX 12 Ultimate — a limitation of the architecture.

2. Memory: GDDR5 and Its Potential

Modest Specs in the Era of GDDR6X

The GTX 880M is equipped with 4 GB GDDR5 memory with a 256-bit bus. The effective frequency is 5 GHz, providing a bandwidth of 160 GB/s. This was sufficient for games from 2014 to 2016, but by 2025, even indie projects on Unreal Engine 5 require at least 6-8 GB.

Impact on Performance:

- 1080p in Older Games: Enough memory for high settings (e.g., The Witcher 3 on medium delivers 40-45 FPS).

- Modern Projects: 4 GB is critically low. Even Fortnite in Performance mode (1080p) can hit memory limits, causing FPS drops.

3. Gaming Performance: Nostalgia or Reality?

Only 1080p and Low Settings

In 2025, the GTX 880M is suitable only for retro gaming or less demanding tasks. Examples of FPS (low/medium settings):

- CS:GO: 90-110 FPS (1080p).

- Dota 2: 60-70 FPS (1080p).

- Cyberpunk 2077: 15-20 FPS (720p, low settings) — unplayable.

Ray Tracing: Not supported. For comparison, even the GTX 16 series (2019) lacks hardware RT cores.

4. Professional Tasks: Weak Specialization

CUDA, but No Prospects

- Video Editing: In Adobe Premiere Pro, rendering 1080p video will take 3-4 times longer than with an RTX 3050.

- 3D Modeling: Blender Cycles works with CUDA, but scenarios with high polygon counts will lag.

- Scientific Calculations: 1536 CUDA cores are too few for serious tasks. Modern GPUs have up to 18,000 cores (e.g., RTX 4090).

5. Power Consumption and Thermal Output

TDP of 100W: A Challenge for Laptops

The GTX 880M has a TDP of 100W, which required a powerful cooling system even 10 years ago. In 2025, such laptops are rare, and new models with similar TDP (e.g., RTX 4070 Mobile) deliver 5-7 times more performance at half the power consumption (80-90W).

Recommendations:

- Use cooling pads to reduce temperature.

- Regularly clean the fans and replace thermal paste.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon R9 M290X and Others

In 2014, the main competitor was the AMD Radeon R9 M290X (4 GB GDDR5, 256-bit):

- In games, the GTX 880M outperformed it by 10-15% due to driver optimizations.

- Power consumption for AMD was higher (TDP ~125W).

Modern Analogues: Integrated graphics of Ryzen 7 8700G (Radeon 780M) already surpass the GTX 880M by 20-30% at a TDP of 65W.

7. Practical Tips

For Those Willing to Take the Risk

- Power Supply: Laptops with GTX 880M required PSUs of 180-200W. Check its functionality.

- Compatibility: Only old platforms (Intel 4th generation, DDR3).

- Drivers: Official support has ended. Use modified drivers (e.g., from the NVCleanstall community).

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- At its time — a top-tier mobile GPU.

- Support for CUDA for basic tasks.

Cons:

- No support for modern APIs (DirectX 12 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.3).

- Limited memory capacity.

- High power consumption.

9. Final Conclusion: Who Should Consider GTX 880M?

This graphics card is an artifact of an era, relevant in 2025 only for:

- Collectors of retro hardware.

- Owners of old laptops needing a replacement for a burnt-out GPU.

- Enthusiasts experimenting with games from the 2010s.

Advice: If budget gaming is needed, consider laptops with RTX 3050 (starting at $800) or mini-PCs with Ryzen 5 8600G ($500-$600). They will provide comfortable FPS in Full HD even in new titles.

Conclusion

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M symbolizes technology from the past decade. Today, it should be regarded only as a historical exhibit or a temporary solution. Modern tasks require GPUs with AI acceleration support, RT cores, and larger memory capacity.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

March 2014

Model Name

GeForce GTX 880M

Generation

GeForce 800M

Base Clock

954MHz

Boost Clock

993MHz

Bus Interface

MXM-B (3.0)

Transistors

3,540 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

128

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

28 nm

Architecture

Kepler

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

8GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

256bit

Memory Clock

1250MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

160.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

31.78 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

127.1 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

127.1 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

2.989 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1536

L1 Cache

16 KB (per SMX)

L2 Cache

512KB

TDP

122W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.1

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_0)

CUDA

3.0

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

5.1

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

2.989 TFLOPS

Blender

Score

194

OpenCL

Score

15023

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Arc A370M

3.237 +8.3%

Quadro P2000

3.092 +3.4%

GeForce GTX 880M

2.989

GeForce GTX 760 OEM

2.868 -4%

GeForce MX450 30.5W 10Gbps

2.766 -7.5%

Blender

GeForce RTX 2060

1506.77 +676.7%

Arc A550M

848 +337.1%

Quadro T1000 Mobile GDDR6

415 +113.9%

GeForce GTX 880M

194

GeForce GT 1030

45.58 -76.5%

OpenCL

Radeon RX 6700S

62821 +318.2%

Radeon Pro 5300

38843 +158.6%

Radeon R9 M290X

21442 +42.7%

GeForce GTX 880M

15023

Radeon HD 5750

884 -94.1%