14 DAY TRIAL // Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA, one of the world's leading vendors of graphics processing units, announced today the launch of its new Optimus technology, a solution designed to provide consumers with a better performance and visual experience out of their notebooks. According to details of the new technology, Optimus-enabled notebooks will enable consumers to choose the graphics processor that they want to take advantage of, with the option to route the workload to either an NVIDIA discrete GPU or the Intel integrated graphics.
“Consumers no longer have to choose whether they want great graphics performance or sustained battery life,” said Rene Haas, general manager of notebook products at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Optimus gives them both - great performance, great battery life and it simply works.”
As rumored on several occasions, the new technology, which NVIDIA briefly announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, looks similar to the company's Hybrid SLI solution. However, the notebook-focused technology can pair an NVIDIA GPU with one of Intel's integrated graphics solution to provide the end-user with the best graphics performance, when playing games, running videos or using GPU compute applications. When the portable computer is used for basic applications such as web surfing or email, the system will run on the integrated graphics processor. This offers a balance between performance and battery life.
“The genius of NVIDIA Optimus is in its simplicity,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, a pioneer of the graphics industry and a leading analyst. “One can surf the web and get great battery life and when one needs the extra horsepower for applications like Adobe Flash 10.1, Optimus automatically switches to the more powerful NVIDIA GPU.”
ASUS, one of the world's leading vendors of portable computer systems, appears to have grown quite fond of the new NVIDIA technology, having already prepared a couple of systems that will provide consumers with a choice for an Optimus-enabled laptop.
