NVIDIA Launches Five New Mobile GPUs

Engadget is reporting that NVIDIA has released five new mobile GPUs to fill some imagined gap in the 200M series lineup. These new chips supposedly double the performance and halve the power consumption of the older chips, but still no word on why they think we need eight different GPU options. "The cards are SLI, HybridPower, CUDA, Windows 7 and DirectX 10.1 compatible, and all support PhysX other than the low-end G210M. Of course, with integrated graphics like the 9400M starting to obviate discrete graphics in the mid range -- even including Apple's latest low-end 15-inch MacBook Pro -- we're not sure what we'll do with eight different GPU options, but we suppose NVIDIA's yet-to-be-announced price sheet for these cards will make it all clear in time."

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, news about low-power GPUs with decent capabilities.

I'm sure hardcore gamers prefer bleeding edge hardware news, but for the rest of us, heat dissipation and power requirements are beginning to be a nuisance more than anything else. I'm sure 99% of computer users would be fine with a dual-core Atom CPU and one of those new GPUs.

I have a duel core atom, and it sucks for flash. Its really sad that you can have the best video solution in the world paired with these and video ends up being the thing that suffers the most.
Once we get HTML 5, and video on the web migrates to a non-CPU based video system that will be true though.

Sucky Summary, could have held the whole FA...

[BobMcD]

NVIDIA is filling in what it presumes to be holes in its next-generation GPU lineup, adding the 40nm G210M, GT 230M, GT 240M and GTS 250M, with GDDR3 memory ranging from 512MB to 1GB, to its existing GTX 280M, GTX 260M and GTS 160M laptop graphics cards. Apparently the new cards sport "double the performance" and "half the power consumption" over the last generation of discrete GPUs they're replacing. The cards are SLI, HybridPower, CUDA, Windows 7 and DirectX 10.1 compatible, and all support PhysX other than the low-end G210M. Of course, with integrated graphics like the 9400M starting to obviate discrete graphics in the mid range -- even including Apple's latest low-end 15-inch MacBook Pro -- we're not sure what we'll do with eight different GPU options, but we suppose NVIDIA's yet-to-be-announced price sheet for these cards will make it all clear in time.

Look at the words changed:

[what it presumes to be holes] becomes [some imagined gap]

[Apparently the new cards sport "double the performance" and "half the power consumption"] becomes [These new chips supposedly double the performance and halve the power consumption]

[we're not sure what we'll do with eight different GPU options] becomes [still no word on why they think we need eight different GPU options]

and [but we suppose NVIDIA's yet-to-be-announced price sheet for these cards will make it all clear in time] gets completely omitted...

WTF?

For those confused about the codenames...

[slyn]

So I was looking around after seeing this earlier to try and make sense of what older generation codenames match to the newer generation codenames, and found this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_m_series.html [nvidia.com] (scroll down).

Basically it goes GTX > GTS > GT > GS > G

The old 9400/8400 line has become the 210/110
The old 9600/8600 line has become the 230/130
The old 9800/8800 GT/GS has become the 250/150
And The old 9800/8800 GTX/GTS has become the 280

There are a few other cards that fall in the middle of categories, but that seems to be the basic gist of it as far as I can tell.

Heres another useful resource for comparing mobile gpu's: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Graphic-Cards.130.0.html [notebookcheck.net]

Re:Suicidal NVIDIA GPUs

[i.of.the.storm]

This is a very important issue for anyone looking into nVidia chips, and I for one won't buy one until it is ascertained whether this issue has been fixed. Apparently the problem was even in a chip as low performance as the Geforce Go 6150 IGP, which is pathetic. An IGP should never have overheating problems, what the hell nVidia.

Re:Laptop graphics cards - help needed

[Atriqus]

Sure, here's a link that'll send you in the right direction.

MXM [wikipedia.org]

OpenCL available on all current nvidia products

[Anonymous Coward]

If they aren't OpenCL compliant, ... then I'll pass. The upcoming ATi updates are rolling in OpenCL which allows for us to have cross-compilation even if Nvidia thinks everyone's gung-ho about CUDA.

AFAIK, Nvidia released OpenCL drivers that run on-top of the nvidia cuda runtime
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_opencl.html [nvidia.com]

Since all recent Nvidia chips are CUDA enabled, they are by default also OpenCL enabled.