The Nvidia NVS 3100M or Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M is a business graphics card that is based on the GT218 core (e.g. GeForce G210M / 310M) but with drivers that are optimized for stability and compatibility in business applications).
Therefore, it is an entry level graphics card with low 3D performance that should be sufficient for low end games and demanding games in very low detail settings and resolutions. For example the old FEAR ran on a G210M in medium to high details fluently. Still, because of the "business drivers" and the slightly lower clock rate, the gaming performance of the NVS3100M may be worse.
The NVS 3100M supports PureVideo HD (with Video Processor VP4) to decode HD videos in the formats H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP using the GPU. This helps reducing the CPU load and should lead to higher battery runtimes when viewing HD videos.
The chip should also support CUDA and DirectX Compute to access the computing power of the graphics card for general tasks (like encoding a video).
The power consumption of approx. 14 Watt (TDP of G210M) is relatively high for a business notebook, but compared to integrated graphic cards, the NVS 3100M should still provide more 3D performance.
The NVIDIA NVS 4200M (or NVIDIA Quadro NVS 4200M) is a business graphics card for laptops which is most likely based on the same core as the GeForce GT 520M. According to the Nvidia Homepage, the 4200M is allowed to be clocked up to 810MHz, compared to the 550MHz of the GT 520M. However, the clock rates of the NVS 4200M in the Dell Latitude 6420 is similar to the GT 520M.
The NVS series is optimized for business applications and stability and may therefore perform a bit worse in games due to the special drivers and BIOS optimizations.
The gaming performance may be a bit worse compared to similar clocked GeForce cards due to the stability optimizations of the NVS. In theory the raw performance of the chip is enough to run current games of 2010/2011 in low-medium details and resolutions.
As the GT 520M, the NVS4200M should support PureVideo HD (VP4) to accelerate HD videos and OpenCL / CUDA / DirectX Compute to use the render cores for other applications.
The graphics card supports HDMI 1.3 up to 1920x1080 and Multimode DisplayPort up to 2560x1600. Furthermore, 7.1 channel HD audio can be trasmitted over the HDMI port.
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.