Similar to Fermi and Kepler, Maxwell / GM107 supports DirectX 12 with feature level 11.0 only. The increased size can handle some of the memory traffic to allow for a relatively narrow memory interface without significantly reducing the performance.

Each of the two GM107 features 5 SMMs and thus 640 shader cores, 40 TMUs and 16 ROPs (128-bit interface).Īnother optimization is the massively enlarged L2 cache (GM107: 2 MB). Smaller Streaming Multiprocessors (SMM) with only 128 ALUs (Kepler: 192) and an optimized scheduler should lead to better utilization of the shaders. Nvidia promises that a Maxwell SMM with 128 ALUs can offer 90 percent of the performance of a Kepler SMX with 192 ALUs. This happens because of different timespans between two frames (e.g., irregular delays between sequential frames).Īlternatively, there is also a version based on the Kepler chip GK104, which has 1152 shader units clocked at 797 MHz.Ĭompared to Kepler, Maxwell has been optimized in several details to increase power efficiency. Therefore, it may suffer from micro stuttering in low fps ranges of 30fps.

The clocks for the SLI-setup are identical to a single GTX 860M. With SLI, each card usually renders a single frame (AFR mode). Each card has a 28 nm GM107 core based on the Maxwell architecture. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M SLI is a high-end DirectX 12-compatible graphics solution for laptops, consisting of two GeForce GTX 860M.

Nvidia geforce gtx 860m review