Today Nvidia revealed the rest of its 2009 mobile graphics card lineup. For those of you who purchased a notebook with a G105M, GT120M, GT130M, or GTS160M, those graphics cards are going the way of the dinosaur after less than 6 months on the market. Replacing them (respectively) are the G210M, GT230M, GT240M, GTS250M, and GTS260M with the smaller fabrication enabling more processing cores and, with the exception of the G210M, built-in PhysX hardware support (previously only available on high-end notebook graphics cards).

Check out what could be in your next notebook at Nvidia's official site or read the article from PC Magazine.

how doe the 260 gts ddr5 compare with the 260 & 280 GTX ddr3?

According to Nvidia, the GTS260M has 96 processing cores, while the GTX260M has 112 and the GTX280M has 128. This means that even though it's based on a smaller fabrication, the new card still isn't as powerful as the GTX models. However, we'll have to wait for practical real-world differences until notebook with the new cards are released.

Wonder how long itll take before manufacturers start selling these in systems

Clevo, MSI, Sager among many are offering models with these graphic cards at the moment. Depending on location, one can buy them now or pre-orders them.

cheers ...

What about the big mainstream guys

I just checked and that is incorrect. The companies you mentioned have models available with the 55nm GTX 260M and GTX 280M "enthusiast" graphics cards, which were released earlier. It's easy to get confused due to Nvidia's bizarre naming scheme this year, but I'm guessing sometime later this year, Nvidia will also refresh the top-end cards with 40nm fabrication and you'll see something like a GTX 265M and GTX285M that will reflect the new process. Until then, we're stuck with 55nm cards at the top end while 40nm cards are everywhere else.

The new ones are in every category except "enthusiast" and are not yet in any currently available or advertised system, to the best of my knowledge.

A more evaluative preview of what we can expect from the new graphics cards is over at Elite Bastards. Check it out!

Incidentally, they also have a guess at which companies will first release notebooks with the new GPUs.

thanks for the linkage, Djembe.

Stand corrected.

cheers ...

What exactly does ddr5 do vs ddr3? Why is it better and how does it effect performance?

GDDR3 and GDDR5 are dual-ported video memory types, which means they can send and receive information at the same time. Because they can do this, they have a performance advantage over system memory, which can only do one or the other (send or receive) at once.

GDDR5 is quite a bit faster than GDDR3, so it can send a lot more information through the same size "pipeline" than GDDR3. In other words, graphics cards with GDDR5 dedicated video memory have better performance due to the faster memory.