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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MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Yeah, 4 letters and 3 numbers are just not enough to get this point across.lordmocha - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
"and while I can’t verify the numbers they claim to provide better performance with a 840M than Iris Pro 5100 while using less than half as much power."i think you mean 5200
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the iris pro in the macbook retina 15" is actually quite amazing for the casual gamer:
doat2: 1920x1200 maximum FXAA 67fps
csgo: 1920x1200 high FXAA TRI 82fps (107fps inside office in corridor)
sc2: 1920x1200 texture = ultra| graphics = med = 78fps
gw2: 1920x1200 - Best Appearance 21fps | Autodetect 50fps (60fps on land) | Best Performance 91fps
diablo3: 1920x1200 high = 56fps
blzd - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
While using 2x as much power as a low end dedicated GPU. Intel just threw power efficiency out the window with Iris Pro.IntelUser2000 - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
With Cherry Trail, they will be able to put the HD 4400 level of performance in Atom chips.Both Nvidia and Intel have secret sauce to tremendously improve performance/watt in the next few years or so to push HPC.
Broadwell should be the first result for Intel in that space, while Nvidia starts with Maxwell. The eventual goal for both companies are 10TFlop DP at about 200W in 2018-19 timeframe. Obviously the efficiency gains gets pushed down in graphics.
lordmocha - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
yes that is true, but with any gaming laptop you'd only get 2 or 3 hours battery while gaming,aka most laptop gamers play plugged in, thus it's not a massive issue, but will affect the few who game not near a power point.
HighTech4US - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Jarred: Actually, scratch that; I’m almost certain a GT 740M GDDR5 solution will be faster than the 840M DDR3, though perhaps not as energy efficient.Someone seems to have forgotten the 2 MB of on-chip cache.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
No, I just don't 2MB is going to effectively hide the fact that you're using 2GB of textures and trying to deal with most of those using a rather tiny amount of memory bandwidth. Does the Xbox One's eDRAM effectively make up for the lack of raw memory bandwidth compared to the PS4? In general, no, and that's with far more than a 2MB cache.HighTech4US - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
So then please explain how the GTX 750 Ti with it's 128 bit bus comes very close to the GTX 650 Ti with a 192 bit bus?JarredWalton - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
It can help, sure, but you're comparing a chip with a faster GPU and the same RAM to a chip with 640 Maxwell shaders at 1189MHz to a chip with 768 Kepler shaders at 1032MHz (plus Boost in both cases). Just on paper, the GTX 750 Ti has 4% more shader processing power. If bandwidth isn't the bottleneck in a game -- and in many cases it won't be with 86.4GB/s of bandwidth -- then the two GPUs are basically equal, and if a game needs a bit more bandwidth, the 650 Ti will win out.Contrast that with what I'm talking about: a chip with less than 20% of the bandwidth of the 750 Ti. It's one thing to be close when you're at 80+ GB/s, and quite another to be anywhere near acceptable performance at 16GB/s.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
"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."You realize that you are speaking to the "PC gaming master race", right? :P