14 DAY TRIAL // By the dawn of next month, NVIDIA will finally have a mobile graphics processing unit capable of standing up to AMD's Radeon HD 7970M.
You'd have thought that NVIDIA would have launched its Kepler high-end mobile GPU by now, but that is not, in fact, the case.
The 600M series has only just begun to surface and they aren't even all that new, not all of them anyway. Some GPUs are rebrands of the previous generation, the 500M line.
Fortunately, the Santa Clara, California-based company is finally stepping up its game, according to the folks at VideoCardz.
During Computex Taipei, an event set to take place early next month (June, 2012), it will launch the GeForce GTX 680M.
A sort of reimagining of the desktop GTX 680, it will have half about as many CUDA cores: 744 or 768.
Up to 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM will be present, working on an interface of 256 bits. What's more, SLI will be supported (not that we're shocked about this).
The clock speeds were not specified, so we can't really speculate on what we are in for, although it is reported that a performance benefit of up to 37% over the GTX 670M was achieved on a Core i7-3720QM Ivy Bridge laptop. At least we know how much energy this thing will need: 100W.
We're willing to bet that the rest of the specs will be leaked in short order, in a week or two. We expect some early listings of notebooks equipped with the GTX 680M to surface within that time frame as well.
That said, within the next few years, a very strange situation may arise. The GTX 680M and all other PC GPUs could see their relevance drop if NVIDIA's other project, GRID, gets off the ground.
If cloud-based gaming really starts replacing console and PC titles, it won't matter so much to NVIDIA if AMD is faster at launching this or that new chip or card, but the latter could be in trouble if it doesn't respond somehow. We haven't heard of any AMD plans similar to GRID so far.
