14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA rolled out the latest GeForce GTX 970M and 980M Maxwell-based graphics cards not so long ago, but now the company is detailing the two GPUs in relation to the gaming systems that are going to embed the technology.
Out of the two cards, the GTX 980M is the high-end offering and the producing company says is about 40% faster than the previous GTX 880M chip.
As for the GTX 970M, it’s a bit less spectacular but will still offer performance improvements, and overall it is better at energy management than the previous generation was.
Now for a little bit of technical details, the new GPUs are based on NVIDIA’s Maxwell 28 nanometer architecture. The 980M model comes equipped with 1536 processor cores, 1038 MHz clock speed and support for up to 4GB of GDDR5 and 265-bit graphics memory.
The 970M version takes advantage of 1280-core, 924 MHz clock speed and up to 3GB of GDDR5 and 192-bit memory.
The new GPUs take things beyond 1080p
Moving away from such details, it’s worthy to point out that the new chips will offer support for high-performance gaming on notebooks with above 1080p displays. That means, games will play on machines with 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution and even on some equipped with 3840 x 2160 (4K) res.
For the systems which take advantage of 1920 x 1080 res, NVIDIA has introduced the Dynamic Super Resolution technology, which is supposed to make games look much better. This is possible because the games will the rendered at a higher resolution and then down-sampled in order to go on the notebook’s display.
The result? Well, in theory you should be able to see more details during your game play.
Battery Boost gets a makeover
Moving along, NIVIDA has upgraded the Battery Boost system in order to bypass scenarios where your game becomes unplayable if you unplug the power chord from the system.
The Battery Boost system has been around ever since the advent of the GTX 800M series processors but NVIDIA says it has made a lot of progress in the last 6 months.
So NVIDIA shows us that the GTX 980M card can render Tomb Raider at 69 frames per second or League of Legends at up to 150 per second, when you are plugged in. When you’re not, rates are decreased to 30-35 frames per second, which can be considered good enough, especially if you’re running out of juice.
On top of that, the Geforce Experience software allows users to optimize settings for plugged-in or unplugged notebooks.
That’s one of NVIDIA’s goals with the two new GPUs, allowing you to play longer while being off the chord.
The first notebooks running the GPU architecture will arrive soon enough and NVIDIA already mentioned five of them, including the ASUS G751 with GTX 980M, MSI GT72 with GTX 980M, Gigabyte Auros X7 with GeForce GTX 970M in SLI, Clevo P150 with GeForce GTX 980 and MSI GS60 (Gold Edition) with GTX 970M.
However, expect to see more notebooks bundling the architecture arrive on the market. For example, MAINGEAR is one of the first companies (not mentioned in the manifest) to have rolled out the NOMAD 17, a system which can be fitted with either of the graphic cards.
