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.
_thumb.jpg)
_thumb.jpg)
_thumb.jpg)
_thumb.jpg)
_thumb.jpg)
_thumb.jpg)
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
91 Comments
View All Comments
adityarjun - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
How would a 860m compare to a 580m?I have a 580m currently and find it fast enough. So if i upgrade again, i would only go for a 860m or so and make savings on the battery life.
JarredWalton - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
NVIDIA says the 850M is 30% faster than the 580M, so the 860M would be another 15% over that.adityarjun - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Wow!! To think that my m17x r3 is already 'slow'.I find the 580m to be quite awesome. The 880m must really be something.
I know there are a lot of other variables but how long do you think a good FHD system with 860m and a processor like i7 4800mq could last on battery?
jtd871 - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Jarred: Having a gaming laptop with Optimus, I'm not convinced of any benefit of Optimus. Since I leave my machine plugged in all the time, it really doesn't give me any benefit. On the contrary, I have the following main issue with Optimus: sometimes software doesn't use the dGPU or the dGPU fails to kick in. I've experienced this with at least 2 titles: AutoCAD 2013 and Zen Pinball 2. In the first case, AC displays an error dialog saying it can't find a real GPU and exits to the desktop. I've actually resorted to running AC2013 on my old ThinkPad that has a discrete GPU. In the second, Zen Pinball 2 (via Steam) apparently finds and runs on the HD4000 iGPU, but is horribly laggy. (Other Steam-based titles seem to run fine.) Optimus for big, power-hungry laptops is probably a half-baked idea given how well the recent major GPUs drop to idle anyway, and I will be shopping for a discrete GPU only in the future.JarredWalton - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
And you can't get either to work by creating a custom profile in NVIDIA's control panel? I have Zen Pinball 2 so I can at least try that, but I haven't ever used AutoCAD so I'm not help there.iwod - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
No Wonder why Apple are designing their own GPU, with the mess GPU maker seems to have with naming things.Novaguy - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Anybody know when the benchmarks come out? I'll love to see the maxwell 860m benchmarked against the 770m and the 750m/755m sli (i.e., the lenovo y510p).kaellar - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Hey Jarred, I'm confused a little with this quote:"One nice benefit of moving to the GTX class is that the 850M will require the use of GDDR5"
It doesn't seem to be true since geforce.com states both DDR3 and GDDR5 are possible for 850m.
ilkhan - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
So nothing all that interesting to replace my GTX770M card with.Anders CT - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
The RAM clocks for the gddr5 cards are specified as 2.5 GHz. Is that a mistake? Shouldn't it be in the neighbourhood of 5 GHz with 80ish GB/s memory bandwidth?