NVIDIA GTX980 on Laptops

NVIDIA GTX 980 on Laptops

GTX 980

Graphics card giant, Nvidia, announces its new product line, the Nvidia GTX 980 gaming laptop series sporting the latest ultra-high grade GeForce GTX 980 video graphics card found only in desktop computers. The up and coming Nvidia gaming laptop is described as a new gaming rig with huge power boost optimized for VR (virtual reality) and overclocking (tweaking the processor-the GPU in this case-to aggressively increase speed and performance).

Crafted using NVIDIA's power efficient Maxwell architecture, the GTX 980 runs at a base 1.1GHz clock speed, with 2048 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR5 video memory (7 Gbps memory speed). All these numbers culminate in a laptop GPU that can comfortable run any of the latest titles at over 60 fps on maximum graphics settings. The GTX 980 can also drive three 1080p displays (should a notebook's outputs allow it), and is "fully certified by Oculus," meaning it's effectively guaranteed to hold up to the demands of VR gaming.

Furthermore, the GTX 980 for laptops is made with serious enthusiasts in mind, and according to NVIDIA, is the first fully unlocked GPU for notebooks. Any laptop sporting the chip will feature NVIDIA software that lets you overclock the GPU, and make other tweaks like set temperature thresholds and cooling fan speeds. Obviously, the GTX 980 is destined for the cream of the crop of gaming laptops, such as the recently announced water-cooled ASUS GX700 (pictured above), and others from the likes of Gigabyte, Clevo and MSI. The 18-inch MSI GT80 will even boast two of the new top-end GPUs, and you can expect many more partners announcing laptops in the near future sporting this new benchmark in notebook graphics.

The GTX 980 gaming laptop series is set to trail-blaze a plethora of extremely fast portable gaming rigs that is, according to Nvidia, made for enthusiasts. Hayley Wiiliams of Gizmodo Australia further discloses that overpowered Nvidia gaming laptops will carry these unique jaw-dropping and eye-popping qualities, to wit: VR compatibility, unlocked GPUs, overclocking enthusiast controls, fan control, and water cooling.

Williams also added that the Nvidia GTX 980 will run at an astounding 1190MHz with overclocking capability and allowing speeds of up to screamingly fast 1400Mhz. GPU overclocking, Wiiliams noted, is highly dependent on the gaming laptop's cooling. Another special feature that is exclusive to the Nvidia GTX 980 gaming laptop is it allows users to overclock the base memory and likewise increase its performance from 7.0Gbps to a whopping 7.5Gbps.

The Nvidia GTX 980 gaming laptop series is strongly geared towards VR gaming. According to Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell, the GTX 980 gaming laptop offers great portable option for the Oculus Rift. "We're excited to see high-performance notebooks powering virtual reality," Mitchell said. Moving on with the Nvidia GTX 980 series, this ultra-high performing gaming laptop is powered by the GeForce GTX 980 that delivers superior graphics prowess to desktop computers. The GeForce GTX 980 is a dedicated desktop-only based graphics card that incorporates the following qualities; to wit, Nvidia MAXWELL architecture, Multi-Frame sampled Anti-Aliasing (MFAA), Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), Voxel Global Illumination (VGI), and many other state-of-the-art improvements and innovations. All of these are incorporated into the new Nvidia GTX 980 gaming laptop series making it truly best in laptop/notebook gaming that beats the competition hands down.

The pricing of the Nvidia GTX 980 gaming laptop series is still undisclosed but be prepared to shell out a ton of currency to acquire this speed behemoth according to Chris Wood of gizmag. Chris also added that a slew of other notebook models from different makers will be taking advantage of Nvidia GTX 980; namely, Aorus X7 DT, Clevo P870DM, Clevo P775DM, MSI GT72, MSI GT80, and Asus GX700VO, respectively.

The Nvidia GTX 980 gaming laptop is Nvidia's response to gamers' clamor for a more robust, more sophisticated, and more customizable gaming rig. If Nvidia does this right, then its new gaming laptop will set a trend for the development of overpowered portable gaming machines using only dedicated desktop computer video graphics hardware as core GPU.

Game Changer

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 Aorus, Asus, Clevo, and MSI.

Besides the binning, Sanghani said cramming a desktop GPU into a laptop also took an enormous amount of engineering to shrink down the board. One issue Nvidia said it had to solve was the trace routes, or the path of the wires that run between the GPU and the RAM. For the utmost in performance, graphics cards use very wide parallel memory buses, which means cramming identical-length wires into a tiny amount of space. This can lead lead to interference that can kill performance, but Sanghani said the new card can hit the same exact same memory bandwidth of the desktop card.

When asked if the use of HBM memory would have been easier, Nvidia officials said this new GTX 980 hit the RAM speeds it needed to with what it has, and oh yeah, unlike HBM, you can actually get the GDDR5 used in the new GPU. AMD and its RAM partner SK Hynix have never commented on the yields of the new HBM memory, but there’s growing suspicion in the industry that the hard-to-get next-generation RAM could be holding back wider availability of AMD's new Fury lineup. It’s mostly an academic discussion anyway, as the GeForce GTX 980 was always designed for GDDR5.

Overclocking

Sanghani said the other engineering feat in the new GeForce GTX 980 is supplying enough power to run it. While the GeForce GTX 980m uses three-phase power, he said, the GeForce GTX 980 was designed to be built with four to eight phases. If you think of a phase as an individual channel, adding more phases generally means each channel has to work less, which in theory increases reliability and stability. With the new design, Sanghani said there's 50 percent more peak current available to the GPU than there is for the GeForce GTX 980m.

Normally this wouldn’t matter that much, but Nvidia also intended for the new GPU to be very overclocker-friendly and overclocking usually requires access to a very clean, stable power source. Overclocking implementation can be decided by the notebook builder and will be dependent on the capabilities of the platform, but one demonstration showed the card running with about a 200MHz boost overclock.

The same design flexibility goes for thermals. Nvidia didn’t release details of the thermal design profile of the new GPU, saying it’s dependent on the laptop design.

VR Support

Nvidia said the new laptop GeForce GTX 980 is the first mobile GPU capable of running VR. The company demonstrated an Oculus Rift Crescent Bay running several games and demos.

While you might think the tiny screen in a VR headset doesn’t require much graphics power, it actually needs more. Gaming on a standard two-megapixel, 1920x1080 monitor at 60 fps takes about 120 million pixels per second, Sanghani said. But gaming on, say, the HTC Vive requires the GPU to push 1680x1512 per eye and also run at 90 fps. That means the GPU now has to push about 450 million pixels per second.

That’s something the GeForce GTX 980m can’t hack, but the new GeForce GX 980 can, the company says. For the record, the minimum GPU for the the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay is a GeForce GTX 970.

Sadly no pricing appears to have been announced yet, but given that this is one of the first laptops to sport a GTX 980, we'd wager that it isn't going to be cheap.