Notebooks are even more powerful!

True desktop performance in a laptop with GeForce GTX 980

 

 

Nvidia said Tuesday that it has hit a true milestone for portable gaming with its new GeForce GTX 980 laptop GPU—true 1:1 performance with its desktop counterpart.

 

That’s right, there’s no ‘m.’ The new GPU is essentially the same as putting a desktop GeForce GTX 980 into a laptop. In fact, Nvidia said, the new laptop GPU is the exact same desktop chip. It has the same 2,048 CUDA cores, the same memory bandwidth, and the same 256-bit memory bus. With the laptop GeForce GTX 980, it says, a consumer can now buy a single-GPU laptop or desktop and get the same graphics performance.

 

How Nvidia did it

So how do you take a ginormous GPU like the desktop GeForce GTX 980 with its 165-watt thermals and power requirements and jam it into a laptop? Very carefully.
Kaustubh Sanghani, a general manager with Nvidia, said to pull off such a feat, the chips are first sorted for power requirements. Known as “binning,” chips can be sorted like diamonds for certain characteristics. Sanghani said the chips with the best power characteristics make the GeForce GTX 980 what it is.
You might think this approach means it’s a limited-edition vapor part that vanishes once the cream of the crop is exhausted, but Nvidia said it’s not. The company, in fact, is going out the gate with no fewer than six laptop models from partners including MSI, Clevo, Gigabyte and Asus