Nvidia Announces the Fastest Mobile GPU Ever

In a recent press release Nvidia has announced the launch of the fastest Nvidia 8-series GPU, the 8700M GT. Pretty straightforward now, isn't? Well, perhaps it is but the chipset itself is worth all the attention in the world since if we were to speak in pure numbers it would probably produce a higher performance index than any other 3D mobile contender.

In terms of time line the new Geforce 8700M GT replaces the existing Go 7950 GTX as Nvidia's fastest mobile GPU at the moment. Aside from the obvious switch from DirectX 9.0c to DirectX 10, NVIDIA also claims that the 8700M GT series can produce 10,371 points in 3DMark05 (default settings). In a direct comparison, a Geforce Go 7950 GTX (also laptop version) scores only 9,395 in 3DMark05 (again at default settings).

In newer games which require very fast HDR processing the 8700M GT is a lot faster than the 7950GTX. Games like Half Life 2 - Lost Coast and Far Cry (HDR patch) run smoothly on the 8700M GT and the card is able to produce about 30% more fps than the older 7950GTX mobile.

Speaking about the technology, the GeForce 8700M GT comes packed with 32 stream processors clocked at 1.25 GHz. The core clock is 625 MHz and the GDDR3 chips (512MB) run at 800 Mhz effectively (or 1.6 GHz DDR). On the downside the GDDR3 chips can only run in 128-bit mode and that results in a relatively low bandwidth (25.6GB/s).

Due to its internal structure, the new GeForce 8700M GT features NVIDIA's second-generation PureVideo HD video processor (which is similar in terms of performance with the 8600 desktop series). The PureVideo HD video processor can handle bistream processing, inverse transform, motion compensation and deblocking tasks in hardware when decoding high-definition AVC/H.264 video formats.

No VC-1 streams are supported though. Regarding availability, this GPU will be integrated at first only by its preferred partners such as Toshiba, Falcon Northwest, Vigor Gaming, Voodoo PC, Sager and Eurocom. Expect more models based on the 8600 design to follow shortly.

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