Posted on Monday, June 02 2008 @ 17:39 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
New GPUs consume more and more power but fortunately GPU makers are working on ways to lower the power consumption of your system. ATI and NVIDIA both have their own technologies and
The Tech Report writes today NVIDIA will bring Hybrid SLI to the notebook platform with the new GeForce 9M GPUs:
Hybrid SLI includes two technologies: Hybrid Power, which allows an integrated GPU to trade off with a discrete GPU to save power, and GeForce Boost, which lets two similarly powered GPUs work in tandem to improve 3D graphics performance. Nvidia says Hybrid SLI in notebooks will "deliver more performance . . . when needed, or save power by switching to the low-power GPU when not." The mobile flavors of Hybrid SLI will likely require an Nvidia integrated graphics chipset like in desktop systems.
GeForce 9M mobile GPUs include new and improved PureVideo HD video processing features, not to mention support for Blu-ray Profile 2.0 features and Blu-ray Live standards, HDMI 1.3 and DisplayPort 1.1 display outputs, and the latest MXM graphics module specification (version 3.0).
Interestingly, Nvidia claims the GeForce 9M mobile GPU series "delivers up to 40% faster performance than the previous generation of GeForce notebook GPUs." Unless the firm has developed a new high-end notebook GPU since the mobile G92, we'd be inclined to suspect high-end GeForce 8M and 9M mobile GPUs aren't too far apart on the performance scale. However, Nvidia may have given its new mid-range offerings a little more punch than previous 8700M and 8600M mobile GPUs, which only have 16 to 32 stream processors and 128-bit memory interfaces.
