NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M Mac Edition
About GPU
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M Mac Edition GPU is a solid performer for an entry-level mobile GPU. With a base clock of 993MHz and a boost clock of 1124MHz, this GPU provides smooth and reliable performance, making it suitable for a variety of gaming and multimedia tasks.
With 2GB of DDR3 memory and a memory clock of 900MHz, the GTX 950M Mac Edition is capable of handling moderate gaming and content creation tasks. Its 640 shading units and 2MB L2 cache contribute to its overall efficiency, allowing it to handle graphical tasks with relative ease.
One downside to the GTX 950M Mac Edition is its use of DDR3 memory, which can limit its performance in more demanding tasks. However, for casual gaming and multimedia use, it should still perform admirably.
With a TDP of 75W and a theoretical performance of 1.439 TFLOPS, the GTX 950M Mac Edition strikes a good balance between power efficiency and performance. It is capable of running many modern titles at respectable settings, making it a good option for users who want a capable GPU for their MacBook.
Overall, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M Mac Edition GPU is a solid choice for users who want to upgrade their MacBook's graphical capabilities. While it may not be the most powerful GPU on the market, it offers good performance for its price point and is a worthy consideration for those looking to enhance their MacBook's gaming and multimedia capabilities.
Basic
Label Name
NVIDIA
Platform
Mobile
Launch Date
March 2015
Model Name
GeForce GTX 950M Mac Edition
Generation
GeForce 900M
Base Clock
993MHz
Boost Clock
1124MHz
Bus Interface
MXM-B (3.0)
Transistors
1,870 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.
40
Foundry
TSMC
Process Size
28 nm
Architecture
Maxwell
Memory Specifications
Memory Size
2GB
Memory Type
DDR3
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.
128bit
Memory Clock
900MHz
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.
28.80 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.
17.98 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.
44.96 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.
44.96 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.
1.468
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.
640
L1 Cache
64 KB (per SMM)
L2 Cache
2MB
TDP
75W
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.
1.3
OpenCL Version
3.0
OpenGL
4.6
DirectX
12 (11_0)
CUDA
5.0
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.
16
Benchmarks
FP32 (float)
Score
1.468
TFLOPS
Compared to Other GPU
FP32 (float)
/ TFLOPS