GeForce 8 Mobile - The Next Chapter in Notebook Graphics

Raising the Performance Bar for Notebooks

With NVIDIA's rising graphics portfolio, products with favorable characteristics, current technological leadership and most importantly being able to supply what the market requires, it is no surprise that Jon Peddie Research (JPR) reported of NVIDIA's steady 28.5% market share for the overall graphics market while ATI's market share kept declining for at least two quarters (now at 21.9% while the rest belong to Intel). While we are all well aware that ATI's inability meet the market needs in both technology/performance and steady supply of its parts are vital reasons for its current state on the desktop side, surprisingly, even the mobile segment has been equally affected. Further findings from JPR have revealed that NVIDIA now has just over 60% of the total mobile discrete graphics market as of Q1 2007. And it looks like this figure will further sway in favor of NVIDIA with the GeForce 8 graphics engine making its way to notebooks in the following weeks.

Today, NVIDIA officially announces the availability of the GeForce 8 Mobile GPUs for a wide a variety of notebooks. Based on the same G84 and G86 cores of the recently launched GeForce 8600/8500 and GeForce 8400/8300 series for the desktop markets, NVIDIA launches a slew of GeForce 8M series GPUs for the notebook market. Silicon-wise, these mobile parts are actually the better yields of the current G84 and G86 dies to ensure that they can operate at lower voltages and TDP (thermal design power) requirements where such minute thermal matters are of a great concern in the mobile computing department. Notebooks built with the GeForce 8M stand to gain all of the features of the GeForce 8 architecture that we've come to know such as DirectX 10 compliance and even the second generation VP2 video processor found on the G84/G86 cores.

If you've not noticed yet, these new mobile GPUs no longer have the "Go" in their naming convention and instead replaced with "M" to denote the mobile segment. Naming conventions aside, those looking forward to own a GeForce 8M based notebook can at least expect 50% higher gaming performance than the previous GeForce Go 7 series. What's worth noting about this performance boost is that the GeForce 8M series stays within the same TDP specs of the previous generation. Sum that up with new and improved engine (excluding the GeForce 8400M G) that we've highlighted in our , and you can see that the new mobile GPU offers far greater performance per watt efficiency in gaming and video acceleration over its predecessors. We haven't had a chance to lay our hands on a notebook with this new GPU to conduct proper testing, but you can be sure we'll scrutinize one in the near future. For now, NVIDIA has this performance graph to share and it pretty much speaks for itself:-

Improved Power Efficiency

The power efficiency of the various notebook components play a key role in prolong the life of a notebook and ever since Intel's Centrino Technology, consumers have had very high expectations in this department. Compared with its integrated graphics controller, a discrete GPU is a potential problem for the notebook vendor to maintain long batter life by virtue of the design and performance nature of the GPU component. Thankfully over the years, the graphics giants of the industry have been constantly improving their designs for greater efficiency while boosting performance in tandem. The new GeForce 8M series follows this principle too and as mentioned on the earlier page, these new GPUs are up to twice the performance of its predecessors while maintaining the same TDP envelope.

Windows Vista however, brings about new challenges as its fancy Aero interface requires constant use of a GPU's 3D pipeline, which in turn translates to more power consumption. To counter this concern as well as improve overall power efficiency of a notebook, NVIDIA has revised the PowerMizer to version 7.0 on the GeForce 8M series. This latest iteration of NVIDIA's power saving technology incorporates several enhancements that brings about both GPU and system-level power savings. Featuring improved power saving circuitry for the PLLs, TMDS controllers and PCIe bus, it ensures only the required power is used depending on the operating state of these components; but wait, there's more. Activity based switching between performance modes and Adaptive Clocking to dynamically tune power to match demand, as well as Dynamic Clock Gating to shut down unused circuitry all help to keep power consumption levels in check. So for example you are gaming away on your notebook, the GPU can shut down the PureVideo HD engine if there's no need for it.

Speaking of PureVideo HD, the new VP2 video processing engine drastically reduces CPU utilization for HD video playback and as shown in our GeForce 8600 GTS article, is extremely competent in handling heavy-duty tasks like playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD movies encoded in MPEG-2, VC-1 and even H.264 without breaking sweat. In fact, NVIDIA shared with us that the power savings with PureVideo HD (running on a VP2 engine) on a notebook is in the range of five to 10W as compared to solely utilizing the CPU. Depending on the notebook, this amount of power savings can equate to another 30 to 60 minutes worth of battery life.

Lastly, PowerMizer 7.0 has an improved PowerDimmer version 2.0. If you recall three years back, NVIDIA debuted the PowerDimmer function that automatically reduces brightness and contrast when no activity is present. The extent of how soon and to what level this feature kicks in was controlled via the power profiles. Version 2.0 builds upon its existing capability by gauging how much power is actually required to comfortably display the contents of the screen. As such PowerDimmer 2.0 dynamically (and constantly) modulates the LCD screen's backlight lamp power to achieve this high degree of power tuning and savings.

Upcoming Notebooks with GF 8M GPU & Sneak Peek at DX10 Gaming!

The Notebooks Gallery (continued)

Showcase - PureVideo HD in Action on the VP2 Engine

GPU Assisted Applications

While there are a handful of common application that can take advantage of a modern GPU's processing prowess to do more than just run 3D games, accelerate video and beautify your Vista interface, there hasn't been much demos or hands-on to really showcase them. With more powerful GPUs getting into notebooks these days, they can surely assist us much more than their traditional roles and NVIDIA had set up demos of two such applications that don't require you to be a rocket scientist or engineer to appreciate them:-

Adding to this list of common applications that thrive on your GPU's processing power to deliver a smoother working experience is the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Surely you would have noticed the drag of navigating through huge PDF files, but the latest version of this handy reader utility takes advantage of GPU acceleration to smoothen your navigation. Such are the subtle changes coming our way to enhance our everyday working experience.

Closing Comments

Well, as great as the new GeForce 8M series from NVIDIA seems to perform, we've yet to give it a go personally since vendors are only know readying their notebooks to hit retail shortly. While this announcement today may see somewhat like a paper-launch, the fact that NVIDIA has not faltered on its rollout schedule in recent times is strong assurance that history would likely repeat itself again.

So far, the demos conducted were convincing and we believe they should stay true even for the actual notebooks released in the channel. ATI's own DirectX 10 based GPU solutions won't arrive till another two months at least, so don't expect any comparisons or competition anytime soon. For now, expect the new Santa Rosa and GeForce 8M equipped notebooks to enter the channel over the next few weeks and hopefully we get to thoroughly put one of them through our usual paces.

Looking ahead, NVIDIA shared with us that GeForce 8M based SLI notebooks might take off later this year in July and that more variety of these high-end gaming-class notebooks should prevail than there are available currently. They also put a note that SLI notebooks based on the Intel Napa platform might debut during the Computex 2007 timeframe and if that does come to pass, it certainly would reflect what NVIDIA has really been working close with Intel to make this a possibility, among other developments that we've recently heard. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more tech articles here at www.hardwarezone.com to satisfy your thirst for information.

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