NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M
The Nividia GeForce GT 240M is a DirectX 10.1 graphics adapter for notebooks based on the GT216 core. It is the successor of the GT 130M and technically a higher clocked GT 230M. Because of the 48 shader cores, it should perform noticeably better than the GT 130M and due to the 40nm production process the power consumption should stay the same.
The core of the GT230M is internally called GT216 and according to Nvidia based on the current high-end desktop architecture (GTX 200 series). Furthermore, Nvidia has improved the micro-architecture for further power saving and performance increases. Therefore, the performance per shader unit should be slightly improved compared to the previous generation.
As the GeForce 9700M GTS, the GT 240M features 48 stream processors that do the work of the former dedicated pixel- and vertex-shaders. The unified shaders of Nvidia are 1-dimensional (AMD has 5-dimensional shaders which leads to the higher number of shaders).
The GeForce GT240M also supports CUDA, DirectX Compute, OpenCL, and PhysiX to use the shaders for other tasks than rendering images (like encoding videos, calculating the physics of a game or mathematical tasks). For these special tasks, the GPU can be noticeably faster than current CPUs.
The mobile graphics card has a built in video decoder called PureVideo HD with VP4. The Video Processor 4 (VP4) supports the full decoding of H.264, VC-1, and now also MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. DivX or XviD). MPEG-1 still wont be supported, but the decoding of this codec is quite trivial on a CPU.
In conjunction with a chipset from Nvidia with integrated graphics (e.g. 9400M), the GT 240M supports Hybrid-SLI (HybridPower and GeForceBoost). HybridPower is a technique to choose between the integrated and dedicated graphics core, if performance or battery runtime is needed. This works only in Windows Vista (and possibly Windows 7). Up to now the user has to use a tool to switch between the GPUs. Later Nvidia wants to switch automatically in the drivers. GeForceBoost is not supported by the GT 240M because the SLI combination would not perform better.
The performance of the middle class gpu GT 240M should be somewhere between the GeForce GT130M and the 9700M GTS and above the GT 230M because of the lower clock rate. Demanding DirectX 10 games like Crysis should run fluently in medium details. Older or less demanding games should run in high detail settings and high resolutions.
Depending on the the used type of graphics memory (GDDR2, GDDR3 or perhaps even DDR2/DDR3) the performance may differ noticeably.
The power consumption of the mobile graphics card is - like the GT 130M and GT 230M - 23 Watt (TDP). Furthermore, according to Nvidia, the new improved core does only need half of the power in Idle mode.
