NVIDIA’s GeForce 800M Lineup for Laptops and Battery Boost
by Jarred Walton on March 12, 2014 12:00 PM ESTClosing Thoughts
Overall, NVIDIA’s mobile GPU solutions continue to be the de facto standard bearer for gaming laptops. AMD’s upcoming Kaveri APUs will almost certainly do well in the budget sector, but users that want more performance – from both the CPU as well as the GPU – will likely continue to go with NVIDIA Optimus solutions, and if you’re the type of gamer that wants to be able to run at least 1080p with high quality settings, you’ll need at least a GTX class GPU to get there. The good news is that you should have plenty of choices in the coming months, and not only are we seeing faster GPUs but many laptops are starting to come out with high quality 3K and 4K displays.
Speaking of which, I also want to note that anyone that thinks “gaming laptops” are a joke either needs to temper their requirements or else give some of the latest offerings a shot. While it’s not possible to simply run all games at 1080p (or QHD+) with maxed out settings without a beefy GPU, even the GT 750M GDDR5 is able to deliver a good gaming experience for most titles at 900p High/1080p Medium settings. The GTX 850M should be quite a bit faster (~60%) than the GT 750M, and we should see it in notebooks that may cost as little as $1000. It’s no surprise then that NVIDIA thinks 2014 gaming notebook sales will be “off the charts”.
As is often the case, we haven’t been sampled any notebooks prior to the launch of the latest 800M series, but we should get some in the near future. We’re looking forward to Maxwell parts in particular, though for now it appears we’ll have to wait a bit for the high-end Maxwell SKUs to arrive (just like on the desktop). It will also be interesting to see how the GTX 860M Kepler and Maxwell variants compare in terms of performance, power, and battery life; I suspect the Maxwell parts will be the ones to get for optimal performance and power requirements, but we shall see.
The latest updates from NVIDIA aren't revolutionary in most areas, but Battery Boost at least could open the doors for more people to consider gaming notebooks. There's always the question of long-term reliability and upgradeability, which are inherently easier to deal with on a desktop, but with a modern laptop I can quite easily connect to an external display, keyboard, mouse, and speakers and never realize that I'm not using a desktop – until I launch a game, at least. What's even better is that when it comes time to take a trip, if all your data already resides on a laptop there's nothing to worry about; you just pack up and leave. That convenience factor alone is enough for many to have made the switch to using a laptop full-time, and I'm not far off from joining them. 2014 may prove to be the year where I finally make the switch.
Last but not least, for those that like the unfiltered NVIDIA slides, you can find those in the gallery below.
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Freakie - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Not only in time for back-to-school, but in time for Broadwell. The power improvements of Broadwell + Maxwell at the very high end will be an incredibly refreshing change in gaming-laptop battery life.willis936 - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
What's the timeframe for laptops showing up with these? A P34G with a GTX 860M (and hopefully a 16GB option) would be great before summer.bakedpatato - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Couple of outlets are running pieces on the "New Razer Blade 14", it has a 3200 x 1800 touch screen and indeed does have a 870m while the Blade Pro indeed has a 860mjasonelmore - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
wtf the pro has a less powerful GPU in a much bigger chassis?jcompagner - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
So now we will get a many nice and light and thin 17" laptops?Currently the only 1 i can by in The Netherlands is the MSI Stealth. I don't know any other. So i guess i just have to wait until the refresh of the Stealth (that i guess will have a 8xxM in side it)
But it would be nice to have way more options.. (for example a 17" with a resolution between 2k and 4k)
Aikouka - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Hm, I think the only disappointing factors are the use of Kepler and Maxwell parts (although not surprising) and the lack of distinguishing between the two architectures at the 860M level. However, I am looking forward to coverage of 860M (Maxwell) parts as I think that will finally be a good sweet spot for me. I have an aging gaming laptop (Dell M1530 with an M8600 GT), and I've grown very used to my ASUS Zenbook... especially its weight (or the lack thereof). So, I'm hoping for a (relatively!) light-weight laptop that has some decent gaming power under the hood.willis936 - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Kepler? How about that Fermi SKU? They have to be blowing the dust off of some old chips to still be selling those. Really the most disappointing thing about the 800 series so far is the fact that there still is no word on desktop parts. As most people are saying they're likely waiting for TSMC 20nm. That is a long gap. The entire desktop gaming GPU cycle has been shifted half a year because of it. I can't imagine nvidia and amd expect to get "back on track" by releasing the 900 series parts a few months after the 800 series.schizoide - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
The 750Ti (and thus 860m) still doesn't match the 7870/660 class GPUs in current-gen consoles and thus isn't a really viable enthusiast gaming platform. The870m is a closer fit, and the 880m definitely does it, but those will be much more expensive. We're so dang close to xbone/PS4-class performance in mainstream laptops, it hurts.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
You can't just look at the CUDA core counts -- the consoles are using AMD chips for one, and AMD shader cores have almost always been "slower" individually than NVIDIA shader cores. I suspect the GTX 750 Ti will give the PS4 and XBOne a run for the money in GPU performance. Couple it with a decent CPU and the only thing really holding us back on PCs is the OS and the need to support "infinity" different hardware configurations.schizoide - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
I'm not looking at core counts alone, all the various game tests have shown the 750Ti to be slower than the 7870 and the 660, which are roughly equivalent to current-gen consoles.