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NVIDIA Launches Mobile Maxwell GeForce GTX 980M and GTX 970M Notebook Graphics
MojoKid writes: When Nvidia launched their new GeForce GTX 980 and 970 last month, it was obvious that these cards would be coming to mobile sooner rather than later. The significant increase that Maxwell offers in performance-per-watt means that these GPUs should shine in mobile contexts, maybe even more-so than in desktop. Today, Nvidia is unveiling two new mobile GPUs — the GeForce GTX 980M and 970M. Both notebook graphics engines are based on Maxwell's 28nm architecture, and both are trimmed slightly from the full desktop implementation. The GTX 980M is a 1536-core chip (just like the GTX 680 / 680M) while the GTX 970 will pack 1280 cores. Clock speeds are 1038MHz base for the GTX 980M and 924MHz for the GTX 970M, which is significantly faster than the previous gen GTX 680M's launch speeds. The 980M will carry up to 4GB of RAM, while the 970M will offer 3GB and a smaller memory bus.
From eyeballing relative performance expectations, the GTX 970M should be well-suited to 1080p or below at high detail levels, while the GTX 980M should be capable of ultra detail at 1080p or higher resolutions. Maxwell's better efficiency means that it should offer a significant performance improvement over mobile Kepler, even with the same number of cores. Also with this launch Nvidia is introducing "Battery Boost" as a solution for games with less demanding graphics, where battery life can be extended by governing clock speeds to maintain playable frames, without overpower the GPU at higher than needed frame rates.
From eyeballing relative performance expectations, the GTX 970M should be well-suited to 1080p or below at high detail levels, while the GTX 980M should be capable of ultra detail at 1080p or higher resolutions. Maxwell's better efficiency means that it should offer a significant performance improvement over mobile Kepler, even with the same number of cores. Also with this launch Nvidia is introducing "Battery Boost" as a solution for games with less demanding graphics, where battery life can be extended by governing clock speeds to maintain playable frames, without overpower the GPU at higher than needed frame rates.
Queue the open source video drive rage spasms...
Graphics card news has been virtually the same since 1999 with the exception of not seeing games that meet future gen card specs on launch. The incentive to run your current gen games at faster than eyeballs speed on a laptop has to have lost its charm when people who purchase high end laptops would prefer portability of ultra books and anyone who demands the performance and travels can ship their desktops to the competitions they are in to need them.
The launches of the laptops that actually support these just felt flat to me from what I saw. Honestly who wants that big a hunk of appliance on their lap at this age? The audience for laptops as big as early 2000 era laptops has to be getting slim. With laptop sales being so flat and performance gamers being what they are it doesn't make any sense for the people who have bought $600 cards every six months to want to be behind again on a $3000 lappy.
Maybe I'm just getting crotchety and I have a 670M.
Mobile graphics cards are never affordable while they are relevant.
What about the 7xxM series? 780M being the flagship?
how about 870M being BETTER in almost EVERY single parameter than 970M?
The 970M is based on Maxwell instead of the Kepler architecture of 870M. It is going to be a lot faster than the 870M despite having a lower number of shaders and a lower clock speed.
There are several reasons for this. In Maxwell memory access is more effective: There is a improved framebuffer compression that increases effective bandwidth by around 25%. L2 cache is now 2 MB instead of 768 KB in 870M. The next and likely more important change are more efficient gpu cores. 970M has 10 SMM cores with 128 Shaders each while 870M has 7 SMX cores with 192 Shaders each. Despite 50% less shaders per core each SMM is ~90% as fast as a SMX. NVidia did many microarchitectural enhancements such as improved instruction scheduling and shorter pipelines.
GTX970 is a about as fast as GTX780 Ti despite having 40% less shaders, 50% less memory bandwidth and only 26% higher clock.
Jan
Good news for developers is: You can connect this to HDMI 2.0 4K TV set in native res (if TV actually support it 60Hz 4:4:4 or RGB mode in 4K, which is not always the case in current range of 4K TVs).
839*929
I am one of (maybe rare) customers for these solutions.
I'm in my late 30's now and have been and still am a gamer. My work requires me to travel around a lot internationally and I decided several years ago that I won't have a desktop PC anymore. So, whenever I'm purchasing a new laptop, I'm always looking for a best performance-to-weight ratio. 6 years ago that didn't go well at all and I ended up with a 17" monster that worked nicely, but was a bitch to carry around. Three years ago I scaled down to a 15" laptop that had decent performance, was much lighter than what I had before, but kept overheating and shutting down if I was running anything a bit more demanding.
Half a year ago it was time for me to switch over again. Now I was actively looking at ultrabooks. But at the time I still didn't find anything that would quite persuade me. Form factor was extremely attractive, but performance was not quite up to what I wanted and needed. I was especially turned off by the lack of RAM that I could fit into most of them. So i went for a next generation of my 15" laptop, which in itself slimmed down over the years and is now a quite attractive thing (in my opinion).
I especially like the concept of switchable graphics, which in theory allows for long hours of work on the go and good gaming experience when power is available. I say in theory, because I had countless issues with Intel graphics drivers and problems that they caused with sleep mode.
In any case, these developments keep convincing me, that desktop is something that I most likely won't be using anymore. And will be more than happy to have a very decent, if not the slimmest, laptop to carry around.
It remains to be seen what support these mobile cards have for double precision floating point (DPFP) operations used in scientific programming applications. The Nvidia 950 M card on the 15" Macbook Pro retina has poor support for DPFP operations and it is very difficult to check even a single test case on these machines. The Nvidia 950 M card offers a paltry 23 Gflops while the host i7 on the 15" Macbook pro offers 120 Gflops. See http://tinyurl.com/cuda-on-mac for details. What do Slashdotters recommend for a mobile, CUDA development laptop ?
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