From PC World: Nvidia dropped its other GPU shoe today, taking the wraps off the mobile version of its “Big Maxwell” architecture, embodied in the GeForce GTX 970M and GeForce GTX 980M mobile graphics processors. The new parts have the same advanced feature set as the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 desktop GPUs that Nvidia announced on September 18.
We covered these new technologies—Voxel Global Illumination, Multi Frame Anti-aliasing, Dynamic Super Resolution—in some depth in our coverage of Nvidia’s new desktop processors. You can read that story here. Nvidia has also made significant improvements to the BatteryBoost power-management technology that’s unique to its mobile processors. I’ll have more on this later.
Perhaps more importantly, the new parts narrow the gap between laptop and desktop performance. In an embargoed briefing last week, Kaustubh Sanghani, Nvidia’s general manager of notebook GPUs, said “the GeForce GTX 980M can deliver 70 percent of the performance of its desktop counterpart.” Sanghani also said that “Maxwell delivers twice the performance per watt compared to Kepler.” Kepler is Nvidia’s previous-generation graphics architecture.
According to Nvidia, 75 percent of gamers play in multiple locations, whether that’s different rooms inside their home, at a friend’s house, or at a LAN party. More of these gamers would buy a gaming laptop over a desktop PC if they could get the same performance with games. Sanghani said the four new technologies in Nvidia’s Big Maxwell architecture, combined with Nvidia’s improved BatteryBoost technology, work to close the gap between playing games on a desktop and playing games on a laptop.
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