Nvidia's new desktop GPUs, the GeForce GTX 970 and 980, are now available in a mobile flavor. The chip maker took the wraps off the GeForce GTX 970M and 980M today and if you're a gamer on the go, there's plenty to be excited about.
In a blog post on the matter, Nvidia outlines why this is such a big deal. As they note, Nvidia's 8th generation GPU architecture, Fermi, delivered about 40 percent of its desktop equivalent in 2010. Kepler, the company's 9th generation GPU, launched in 2010 and closed the gap to 60 percent which gave gamers 1080p resolution and "ultra" settings.
With Maxwell, that gap shrinks to 80 percent of the desktop equivalent and pushes the resolution well beyond 1080p.
Both mobile GPUs are based on Maxwell's 28nm architecture. The lesser GTX 970M feature 1280 CUDA cores with a base clock of 924MHz plus an unspecified boost clock. It uses a 192-bit memory bus that tops out at 120GB/sec.
The beefier GTX 980M, meanwhile, is packing 1536 CUDA cores and a clock speed of 1038MHz with an unspecified boost clock. It has a wider 256-bit memory interface width that translates into a memory bandwidth of 160GB/sec.
Both cards use GDDR5 memory clocked at 2500MHz and support the latest APIs and technologies including Optimus, Battery Boost, GPU Boost, GameStream, ShadowPlay, DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.4, OpenCL 1.1 and PCI Express 3.0.
Notebooks equipped with Nvidia's latest mobile GPUs will begin shipping today from a number of different manufacturers including Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Maingear and OriginPC, just to name a few.