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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ThreeDee912 - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Very minor typo on the first page."The second GTX 860M will be a completely new Maxell part"
I'm assuming "Maxell" should be "Maxwell".
/nitpick
gw74 - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
why do I live in a world where thunderbolt eGPU for laptops are still not a thing and astronomically expensive, mediocre-performing gaming laptops are still a thing?willis936 - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Because outward facing bandwidth is scarce and expensive. Even with thunderbolt 2.0 (which has seen a very underwhelming adoption from OEMs) the GPU will be spending a great deal of time waiting around to be fed.lordmocha - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
the few videos on youtube show that it is possible to run graphics cards over TB1 4x pice, and be able to achieve 90%+ performance out of the card when connected to an external monitor and 80%+ performance when feeding back through the TB to the internal monitorso basically eGPU could really be a thing right now, but no-one is making a gaming targeted pcie tb connector. (sonnet's one needs an external psu if you are trying to put a gpu in it)
rhx123 - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Because GPU Makers can sell mobile chips for a huge increase over desktop chips.A 780M, which is roughly comparable to a desktop 660 nets Nvidia a hell of a lot more cash.
A 660 can be picked up for arround £120 these days, whereas on Clevo reseller site in my country a 770-780M upgrade costs £158.
Nvidia knows that a large percentage of very high end gaming laptops (780M) just sit on desks and are carried around very infrequently, which could easily be undercut piecewise with a eGPU.
My 13inch laptop, 750Ti ExpressCard eGPU, and PSU for the eGPU (XBOX 360) can still easily fit into a backpack for taking round to a friends, and costed much less than any similar performing laptop avaible at the time, and when I don't need that GPU power then I have an ultraportable 13 inch at my disposal.
CosmosAtlas - Wednesday, March 26, 2014 - link
Because intel does not give permissions for making thunderbolt eGPU. I was waiting for a thunderbolt based Vidock, however it will never happen because of this.willis936 - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
So I take it nvidia hasn't hinted at the possibility of g-sync chips being included in laptop panels? I think they'd make the biggest impact in laptops where sub 60 fps is practically given on newer titles.JarredWalton - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
I asked about this at CES. It's something NVIDIA is working on, but there's a problem in that the display is being driven by the Intel iGPU, with Optimus working in the background and rendering the frames. So NVIDIA would have to figure out how to make Intel iGPU drive the LCD properly -- and not give away their tech I suppose. I think we'll see a solution some time in the next year or two, but G-Sync is still in its early stages on desktops, so it will take time.Hrel - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
I'm surprised you guys didn't say anything about the 850M not supporting SLI. I was expecting a paragraph deriding that decision by Nvidia. I'm really upset. I would have loved to see how energy efficient SLI could get. Lenovo has had that laptop with 750M in SLI for about a year now and I've thought that was kinda stupid.But considering how power efficient Maxwell is maybe that could actually be a good idea now.
Maybe they'll still do it with underclocked GTX 860M's.
Hm, I bet that's what Nvidia wanted. To discourage OEM's from buying 2 cheaper GPU's/laptop instead of ONE hugely expensive one. Prevent them from SLI'ing the best GPU in their lineup.
Yep, pissed. I'm pissed.
Hrel - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
best GPU for SLI* in their lineup.