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NVidia NV17M Mobile GPU Preview
Mathew Solnik writes: "A year ago nVidia set the laptop world on fire with the release of the GeForce2 Go mobile graphics chipset. Today they push the envelope with the release of the NV17M mobile graphics chipset. Offering unmatched performance in 3D gaming applications, the NV17M promises to put nVidia at the forefront of high end graphics solutions for mobile systems. This GPU is much faster then the Geforce2 Go and is more or less the Geforce3 for laptops. Check out AMDZone for the preview." Pretty incredible how powerful laptops are, even given their lag behind desktop performance. This is far more powerful than any video card I've ever owned.
I can't wait for some laptop-weilding punk to come and beat my nice desktop's Max Payne framerate. I guess I'm going to have to buy a GF3 just to stay on top of all those c-c-crazy laptop users!
<insert obligatory overheating joke here> Anyway, please pick the submissions a little more carefully. I don't want to read press releases on Slashdot.
Personally, Laptop gaming is nice... except for
-the small screen
-the cramped keyboard
-the battery life....
I just don't see a reason, honestly, for having 'awesome gfx' in a laptop.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
when is nVidia going to get to work on the desperate need for graphically accelerated pda's?
It sounds like the polygon count is high enough, so are laptops a viable gaming platform? (sure would make it easier to attend those LAN parties and smoke pot ... oh wait...)
- Cheers,
- RLJ
Gaming on a laptop is unwieldy. Even though my laptop gets perfect FPS in TFC at 1024X768, I'd still much rather play it on my desktop (which also gets perfect frame rates). Even if I felt like installing my keyboard and mouse on my laptop, gaming on it just doesn't seem right. Besides, unless you're rich and have plenty of time to sit and play multiplayer games on your laptop away from home, a desktop is perfect for gaming usually.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I've always hated playing 3D shooters on laptops because the screen seems to blur with fast movement. I would expect high graphics settings to produce lots of heat in that little pressure cooker lap top case too. Would be great if all the peices came together though.
Isn't there a huge loss of performance when it comes to the laptops screens? Are there actually screens available that will be able to handle 75hz refresh rate? (The rate needed to display 75 fps).
FPS look great on paper, but will it actually result in an improvement in the playability?
I move around a lot, and I may replace this ageing hulking dinosaur that I'm currently using with a laptop just for convienience. So to aid me, does anyone know of what kind of cash I could expect to be parting with for a laptop with these?
This is the worst sig ever.
I've been waiting forever for a company to come out with notebook video chipset that could actually play games at a decent performance level. This new chipset is probably faster than my TNT2 in my desktop machine. My Toshiba laptop came with some sort of pathetic 2Mb 3D acceleration that actually ran magnitudes slower than the software rendering mode. I'm curious how exactly the chipset will affect power consumption. Does this chip require a fan or some other non passive cooling?
The availability of a decent GPU in a notebook computer is what sold me on a new notebook versus another desktop. I like being able to just pickup my notebook and walk into a LAN party carrying all my equipment in one hand and still have framerates that equal or best most of the people I play with. It's great.
The downside is that the GPU likes to use power. Quite a bit too. With my Dell system with just one battery I can get 2 hours playing graphics intensive games. I almost made 4 just typing documents. That's fine for me.
If I wanted to have longer battery life I wouldn't have gotten a machine that is classified as a desktop replacement.
OK if this doesn't make you drool, then you must be at the wrong web site.
I can see Nvidia's next generation GPU to have embeded DRAM. This one is soo close.
Yuo = stupid. Friend = saved.
I never saw the point myself
great you can mangle triangles and blit them to the screen fast
OR
have 2 hours more working time
now on a trip on a train which would you rather have
intel have finally woken up to power with transmeta breathing down their backs and you guys want to waste it useing these cards.
hell Xscale / MIPS with a LCD controller on chip is way for me
regards
john jones
I don't find that very funny! =( I cam here for help and nobody is helping me, you are all a bunch of mean geeks! May Bill Gates outlive you all and spit on your graves!!!
Yes, this is a silly comparison:
NV17M Marcus' home PC
_____________________________
350MHz 200MHz
64MB 32MB
2048*1536 640*320
1 square inch 2 square feet
Erm. Quake? Whats that....
A friend of mine has a P3 1gig + geforce2go, I have a tbird 700 + geforce2gts. His outperforms mine in UT - he plays at 1600*1200, I play 1024*768. Its pretty impressive. The disadvantage of laptops, however, is price - a high-end AMD system can be built for aruond $600 + monitor, whereas a laptop costing that much would most likely be slow and have a terrible quality display.
My server
The two P3 + Geforce2go-based laptops I've seen don't seem to have any streaking / blurring in FPS games... but the cheap Celery 650 blurs severely.
My server
I'm beginning to doubt the performance ratings. The 17M rates at 40.9 fps for Max Payne at 1024x768x16, and 79.5 fps for Q3 at 1024x768x32. It also says for relative performance that in Q3, the 17M outperforms the GF2Go by 5x, and in Max Payne by 3.5x. I know for a fact that this cannot be the case, because I have an Inspiron 8000.
Here are the benchmarks for my system:
Q3 1024x768x32: 49.7. High Detail.
Max Payne 1024x768x16: (no FPS display, definitely playable, I'd say ~24). Max Detail.
The system is a 1ghz/256M running Windows 2000. Unless NVidia's benchmarks were done on say, a 500mhz laptop, I'd imagine much better performance than what they'd note; especially nothing that NONE of the benchmarks broke the 100 fps mark, when according to my numbers, they should have creamed it (Q3 1024 at 5X GF2 should have been 250 fps, and Max Payne should have been near 90).
More and more companies are now purchasing laptops as the main machine instead of desktops. Granted, nobody should be playing FPS games at work. There are other valid uses as well.
If there is an option to turn off sections of the GPU to suit truly mobile tasks, this could please quite a few.
-FlynnMP3
#include
Sounds like they are trying to fit square wheels on your laptop and make it roll down a hill. If only 3Dfx was still around...
Don't nobody say there's no real humor on the web anymore. Just read Slashdot. No, not the posts, silly, the articles. -moof
The review/preview makes a big deal about how most laptop DVD players drain the batteries before the movie is entirely over, or very shortly after. Using a dedicated graphics chip to render the animation should improve the battery life by quite a bit.
Please. Enough with laptops on fire. I cannot stand any more heat - my dell has already burnt the hair off my balls. Thank you, Reikk
EVERYTHING is there in a laptop to replace an average workstation, but there's one thing I'd really like for overall performance boost... if you can stick a high power processor, high resolution LCD panel with super brightness, and have a 3d GPU in the lot, how about IDE raid, imagine having 2x48GB striped under your laptop, a second drive wouldn't take that much more volume (ok forget about the ultrathin or small laptops, we're talking about a nice workstation replacement here :)) I'd like booting off a laptop faster... IDE RAID would be the best solution for speed increase in that area. The drawback of course would be doubling the chance of losing data but then again you could also put mirroring or striping as options (so mirroring would actually ensure data integrity from disk drive failure).
I am using a Dell 8100 notebook 512MB ram, external 80GB firewire drive for dumping data that I won't access too often, 48GB 2.5" drive, overall my rating is 9/10, it ROCKS, the IDE raid thing would really be welcomed but I know it's not a mainsream request, unfortunately.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
more drivers that don't _FUCKING NOT COMPILE_!
ATI Unveils MOBILITY FIRE GL 7800
World's fastest and most powerful mobile workstation GPU designed for 3D animation and CAD/CAM
Read it here: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/011112/122494_1.html
I don't own a desktop system anymore. Don't think I'll ever get one again, either. But I've had just about enough of "[1337] k001b0y" plastering me with the AWP just because my software renderer decided "this would be a great time to drop the fps to 2".
:)
So i applaud nVidia for this initiative. Here's to hoping that ATI can counter with an even better card
The review states that NVidia has vendors lined up. Yeah, right. Who are they, and why aren't they listed in plain view on the website? The problem with the GeForce2 Go right now is that nobody bloody sells it. Toshiba, yeah, but with dinky 1024 x 768 screens. Dell, yeah, but they're, like, Dell, and their hardware reliability is questionable. I acknowledge that high performance mobile graphics is a small niche market, but it's unfortunate to have so few choices when shopping for this type of device. And it's only gonna be worse for the next gen graphics chipset.
Now, if IBM would offer me a PIII-M laptop with 1600 x 1200 display and a GeForce 2 Go (or one of these NV17M chips), I would happily pay for it. It would be very beneficial to me.
sigh...
I am the very model of a modern major general!
I was a pretty hard core gamer before this thing called work creeped up! :)
... my $0.02CDN (about $0.000012USD)
Anyway, are there really any hard core gamers out there that would be playing on a laptop?! I know I wouldn't. I know someone who currently only owns a laptop and he plays his Counter-Strike at work.
If I owned a laptop, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be doing my gaming on it. I would want a laptop for doing work while on the road. Besides, I'd want the extra battery life from using a non-too-powerful GPU over the 3D capabilities any day!
Anyways
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
...will it support linux?
I hope it finds its way into the PowerBook sometime soon.
On a train? I would just bring an extra battery.
Trains have 3-prong power outlets nowadays. Why are you bringing an extra battery again?
As a Senior Network dude for a company that specializes in massively multi-user (isn't that getting old fast?) on-line 3D environment technology, I can tell you we're waiting with bated breath for these kinds of developments. Right now we use one of the laptops with the GeForce 2 Go chipset, and we'd love a laptop with this new chipset. More FPS with all the features turned on == better demo == better chance of closing a valuable deal.
Also, when we developers travel, it helps to be able to work on the environment while on the move. Our system requires quite a powerful system (if you insist on running the various servers and the client all on the same box - *grin*) to allow you to do testing and full blown development on the move.
So, _you_ might not see the reason for this, but believe me, a lot of companies working with any kind of 3D technologies certainly will, as will developers and people who like to go to a LAN party using something smaller than an SUV (moving my 19" hitachi monitor is a b*tch)....
Tomb.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Look at the stock chart over the past 3 months... totally the wrong direction compared to the NASDAQ :)
http://quotes.nasdaq.com/quote.dll?chart=1&page=ch arting&mode=basics&symbol=NVDA%60&selected=NVDA%60 &elem=0 [nasdaq]
Evil ZEN Scientist
I've been on trains with power plugs. They're geared to road-warriors. Just like some types of planes (well, perhaps 9/11 may have affected this .... haven't flown since).
:)
Low power + high graphics frame rates with full textures, shaders, and the whole nine-yards would be great. Given that right now it is an either or scenario, your choice of laptop has to be based off need. Don't get one of these power-consumptive laptops if your first concern is long battery life.
OTOH, if you like some portability and some battery life (you have a window of battery life) along with the capability to take powerful 3D with you, these laptops are the way to go.
Eventually, these and the low power laptops will maybe merge and won't that be a happy moment for all of us?
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
in my experience nvidia cards/chips have terrible image quality compared to most other companies. All they seem to care about is frame rate. Doesn't anybody care about image quality any more? Is framerate/speed enough justification for insane prices? just my 2 cents
Epic Games' Unreal Tournament and id Software's Quake 3 were both ported to various consoles recently. One of the target consoles had a keyboard and a mouse as an option (so you could get Internet access on it). One of the game companies (I think it was Epic, but I could be wrong) decided to implement PC-style keyboard/mouse controls (the usual setup is W/A/S/D for movement, mouse for aiming and shooting) for those who had the right hardware.
The other (probably id Software, but again, I could be wrong) only included support for the normal console gamepad. I've heard rumours that this was for fairness, because they watched some games of a beta and realised how easy the keyboard and mouse users found it to frag the poor deprived people with gamepads :-)
A lot of frame rate counts are also capped... unless you get into the driver and do some tweaking. Using a simple locale in our system and a low res with a low colour depth and few textures, I'm able to get some stupidly high frame rate for my GeForce 2 GTS (in the hundreds of FPS)... now if the tweak in the driver is turned off, that'd max at 75 or 85 (whatever the refresh rate was set to). Just something to beware when comparing frame rates. There is a setting (something to do with coolBits) that you need to set in your driver's config in the registry (on Windoze boxes) that'll let you uncouple frame-rate from the refresh rate (some versions of the drivers will give you a GUI road to this same setting). Tomb.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
The cool thing about this announcement is that it probably means we will start to see NVIDIA's technology in smaller/lighter notebooks. The -2Go chips were great, but OEMs only packaged them in monstrous, heavy, machines like the Dell 8100. I assume this new chip is something like the low-end "MX" series, so it should be available in lighter notebooks (if not in ultralights).
Finally I will get both my wishes - an easily portable notebook, with graphics hardware by the only company that can engineer a good graphics system. (news flash: ATI doesn't count. Their driver developers couldn't program themselves out of a cardboard box)
I know I'm going to get modded down of this, but why do linux users like Nvidia products, if there is only closed binary support for them??
That defeats the entire purpose of using an open source and free Operating system. If I wanted to use CSS drivers, I would have stuck to Windows and had real support from Nvidia.
Just makes me wonder, thats all
Sunny Dubey
cat /proc/sys/kernel/tainted if you have an nvidia kernel module loaded.
Hmmm interesting to see that Nvidia have updated their GeForce2Go. What I am more surprised is how little attention ATi's Mobility Radeon has had.
7 50 0/
* ht tp://www.sourcemagazine.com/csm/Forum3/HTML/000048 .html
From what I can gather ATi had not already kicked Nvidia's teeth in already but NV17M only *just* matches its performance!
http://www.rage3d.com/reviews/hardware/mobility
http://srd.yahoo.com/goo/Ati+Mobility+Radeon/2/
I will be buying a new laptop come January and will probably buy another Dell. Indeed they seem to be the only manufacturer that offers these high performance chipsets. Well except for Toshiba I think.
So any ideas on which which one to buy?
Regards,
Po
The mobile Radeon 7500 was announced some time ago, and it made the GF2 Go look like crap too (not that hard really).
Everyone gets hyped that this thing comes out, but ATI has already beat them to it, it offers similar features. I've heard that ATI's powersaving features are far more advanced too.
Its also funny that they say that NVidia offers unmatched DVD playback, because they've always been awful at that.
The benchmarks for the mobile 7500 were incredible, and NVidia is right out lying about their numbers, there is no way around that. It makes the Go look faster than the 7500, when the mobile 7500 was far far faster than a standard 64 meg radeon, and very close to a full blown Radeon7500.
I believe ATI is also packing 32 or 16 megs of DDR with their mobile chip, giving the laptop manufacturer the option to add more, making it more cost effective. So all these new features, aren't new.
So, is Nvidia going to release specs or will we have to make due with their crappy drivers that cause kernel panics when you do stuff like run tar?
I've been wanting to upgrade my aging Toshiba Satellite, but so far every Athlon notebook I've found uses some lame graphics chip rather than nVidia or ATI Radeon series chips. And no SXGA+ or UXGA res screens either. Has anyone found one? Maybe we'll see them early next year when the 130nm Mobile Athlons come out?
Maybe Micron will build one. Their new Athlon/nForce desktops look sweet, definite Dell-killers.
Today my Dell Inspiron 8100 came in. PIII 1GHz-M, 384M memory, 30G disk, 8X DVD, 15.1" Super XGA+ screen that does 1440x1050, and a 32M DDR GeForce 2 Go.
;*(
I thought I was king of the world. So I throw it on my LAN and go to slashdot...
... to see the upcoming GeForce3 Go be announced.
Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!! It's not fair!
-----
That's why the scores seem low, and that's also why there's such a dramatic improvement over the GF2Go and Mobile Radeon 7500.
The NV17M does multi-sampled AA, which one texture lookup per pixel, instead of one texture lookup per sample. This gives considerably greater performance, but the quality of the texture filtering is not as high. The GF2Go and Mobile Radeon 7500 both use supersampling, which uses the slower (but arguably higher quality) method.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If it is anything like the GeForce 2 Go, it'll be 6 months before who see a laptop with this in it, and I will actually bet it's longers. The Turn around time with laptops and new hardware is longer, because laptops are tpyically used by business users, not gamers, and they simply do not purchase a new laptop every year. I think NVidia will find that their 6 month turn around time on new products won't work quite as well. I hope I'm wrong though, even though this makes my GeForce 2 Go outdated! :-) I'll give them this though, if it's as fast as the specs make it seem: just damn! The GeForce 2 Go is unbelievably fast for a laptop, and it sounds like they have some dvd decoder functions built-in, which is something most laptops need but lack, especially if one could output the dvd playing to the tv-out independant of the LCD output (possible, but not the greatest method, via twinview.)
Derek Greene
nVidia supplies source code only for the 2D functionality on their cards to date, apparently because their technology draws on some patent-encumbered features from third parties (rumored SGI). nVidia flatly refuses (and indeed cannot) release the specifications to Open Source developers.
nVidia supplies a binary precompiled OpenGL-accelerated driver for Linux, or rather several varieties for different kernel configurations. However, those precompiled drivers are (1) not supported by some distributions (e.g., Red Hat) because they can't be properly debugged, fixed or improved by distribution-producing companies, and (2) are unstable for some people running Linux for unknown reasons. A badly written kernel plugin can wreak plenty havoc on the whole running system, with little protection.
Matrox and ATi are more supportive of the Open Source world, because they are in control of their own technologies and see the benefit of many developers collaborating on their drivers. DRI support can move forward to get fast and safe access to video hardware without endangering the safety or security of the rest of the machine.
One of the Windows technologies' biggest problem is the unexplained BSoD. Death from nowhere with little explanation. The major cause of BSoDs is poorly written device drivers which run in an unprotected ring zero environment. One bad instruction can ruin your whole machine's state. Is this what we want for the Linux environment? Are we going to keep adding unprotected, unknown and undebuggable closed source solutions into the Linux kernel, adding more and more sources of kernel lockups? Do we need to start talking about a PSoD (Penguin Screen of Death)?
I'm looking forward to the upcoming drivers for new ATi Radeon cards, myself. Open Source DRI/DRM drivers and solid 2D and 3D performance. How about you?
[
Point being, I use it for everything. Gaming is just part of it. I have a 15.1 inch screen and I use it for business presentations. I go to University and I bring it with me so I can work in the library. We have stations everywhere so I can plug in power and ethernet or serial. Seriously, its great being able to put down 2-3 grand (CANADIAN!) and get something that can do that and still have power left over for some 3D design (only tried Bryce 4 so far, but it works OK) I've got a PIII 750 with 128 mb RAM and 12 GB of drive space. Oh, and I just used it at a LAN party two days ago.
Large animal tranquilizer, you're my only friend.
It depends completely on why an individual chooses to use a Linux environment (with the GNU utils or otherwise). I mean, there are a variety of reasons people may use Linux, beyond the source licensing. Free software, maintained by a distributed group of people is definitely a draw.
Apparently having a single closed-source binary module defeats the open-source nature of the kernel and all the available software that is under an open source license. I personally have played with the source of a lot of programs, but have never felt the need to hack my graphics driver. Apparently I should be using some other platform, according to your logic.
I haven't checked recently, but can anyone attest to the speed and stability of the new ATi drivers for Linux? I know they've made leaps and bounds beyond what I've seen in the past, but from this post it seems like the new drivers are "upcoming."
ATi's drivers for Windows have recently been a lot better, but in recent memory they've been pretty dodgy. My roommate has a well-utilized Radeon, and he's come across quite a few driver issues. Most have been resolved by this point, but it's taken a while.
Yes, ideally these issues would be fixed quickly with an open source driver. But, would they? Some drivers tend to fall by the wayside, or end up with just as many crashes as so-called "unprotected, unknown and undebuggable closed source solutions."
I'm looking forward to ATi's new drivers, but I'm not so sure how quickly they'll make their appearance, or if they'll be on par with NVidia's current "unstable" drivers.
Ultra Fast TFT - I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 capable of 1600x1200 - and it's plenty fast to play on, on halflife/counter-strike i get around 50-60fps at 1024x768 - but the screen is simply too slow!! ;)
Cheaper faster FTF please! Way to go NVidia
Fact is, noone really cares. We all use Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
The problem with the GeForce2 Go right now is that nobody bloody sells it. Toshiba, yeah, but with dinky 1024 x 768 screens. Dell, yeah, but they're, like, Dell, and their hardware reliability is questionable
Not in my experience (Now up approx 500 Dell PC's installed) Dell hardware is very reliable. It's their GeForce2Go drivers that could do with some attention. I've got 3 Dell 8100 here in the office, All three are absolutely brilliant, except mine has XP. And the video driver keeps forcing XP to crash. I had to install a BETA driver before the damn thing worked right. Now it is, I'm very happy. Not the first time I've had problems with Dell drivers, especially on newly released hardware.
All in all, the GeForce2Go works incredibly well and so does the 8100. I rarely if ever need to use anything else and it's worth every cent.
"Old Rallydrivers never die - they just fail to book in on time"
Matrox doesn't really "get" FS. Their Linux drivers (based on GPL code) are buried behind an illegal click-through. And the features of their latest cards are not supported under Linux.
Nvidia may not play by the RMS rules of Open Source but they do support it. The reason they don't use the standard interfaces is because they have a unified driver on i386 systems. (Linux, Windows 9x & NT, and I think beos all use the same driver, they just have a wrapper around it to interact with the OS) Do a google for the FreeBSD nvidia driver, it failed because of an incompatibility but they were supposedly very supportive of it.
And yes it's unstable but they give very good support. I got a reply from them in 2 days. On a sunday.
----- The problem with browsing at +5 is that everyone thinks you're being redundant
Since the XBox uses a GeForce 3 part, we should see games that use the vertex shader hardware real soon now.
How many PC's ship with the GeForce 3 as the base configuration (unlike its cheaprer cousin the MX)? The trouble is that the GeForce 3 with its power and expense is an ideal after-market card for those who want it.
However, portables don't have that option. Assuming that the price for the NV17M is anything like the GeForce 3 (and nVidia will have real problems with its vendors if it doesn't), you're looking at adding a few hundred dollars to the price of every portable for power that only a fraction of the users will want.
I can't see many manufacturers choosing this chip. I wonder what nVidia was thinking?
I work on the Sledgehammer Linux port, so I regularly compile binutils, gcc, glibc, kernel, X and other stuff on my machines. Besides compiling, I use the machines to run the simulator for the chip. I'd say I stress my machines more than most people.
I have a Ghz Athlon workstation, a Dell 850 MHz Pentium 3 based Inspiron 8000 and a GHz Mobile Athlon based Compaq 1200Z.
My workstation is between two or three times faster than both laptops. Now, how can that be when they have somewhat comparable cpus? Because of a fact that a faster cpu or graphics card can't change: The I/O subsystem in a laptop is so horrible that it's beyond comparison with our workstation I/O. And, have in mind that the x86 PCs have the worst I/O performance of all architectures. Whenever I fire up the simulator, then the laptops are pretty fast, because that is almost exclusively cpu bound. Compiling or other more full-system stuff makes the laptops crawl.
I'd say to every gamer or hacker out there: Don't buy a laptop because you think it's a desktop replacement. The overall system performance on them sucks and you will be disappointed. By a laptop if you need a mobile computer.
Bo Thorsen,
SuSE Labs.