Nvidia today officially announced a new family of NVIDIA GeForce 8 Series of graphics processors targeted at the newly evolved notebook PC market.

Code-named GeForce 8M series, the new GPUs help power a whole new generation of notebook PCs that promise to deliver a new visual experience for Windows Vista, DirectX 10 games, HD movies, and applications like Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Live Maps?changing.

The new GeForce 8M Series notebook GPUs?the first to support DirectX 10 and fully accelerate decoding of H.264 full HD movies?are available now from Europe?s top PC makers, including Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Medion, Packard Bell and NEC Computers SAS.

Initially available in the GeForce 8600M and GeForce 8400M versions, the new GPUs make realistic DirectX10 3D games and vivid HD video playback on notebook PCs a reality.

	8400M G	8400M GS	8400M GT	8600M GS	8600M GT
Stream processors	8	16	16	16	32
Core clock	400 MHz	400 MHz	450 MHz	600 MHz	475 MHz
Shader clock	800 MHz	800 MHz	900 MHz	1200 MHz	950 MHz
Memory clock	600MHz	600 MHz	600 MHz	700 MHz	700 MHz
Max memory	256 MB/64bit	256 MB/64bit	512 MB/128bit	512 MB/128bit	512 MB/128bit
Memory bandwidth	9.6 GB/sec	9.6GB/sec	19.2 GB/sec	22.4 GB/sec	22.4 GB/sec

Nvidia says that the new GPUs include a new unified architecture that delivers up to 2x the performance of previous generation GPUs. PureVideo HD video processing engine is available for playback of HD DVD and Blu-ray video. Nvidia said that the new video-processing engine performs 100% of the H.264 HD video decoding, freeing the CPU for other tasks and significantly reducing power consumption, heat and noise. In addition, NVIDIA PowerMizer technology offers a longer battery life.

The new NVIDIA 8M Series GPUs are available in the GeForce 8600M and GeForce 8400M models.