GeForce 8M Series: DX10 for Notebooks

Wednesday 09th May 2007, 06:06:00 PM, written by Arun

NVIDIA is releasing the notebook versions of their GeForce 8 Series GPUs today, specifically the G84 and G86. The highest-end model is the GeForce 8600M GT, which is unsurprisingly clocked slightly lower than the desktop equivalent but shares all of its new features, including PureVideo HD and DirectX 10 support.

The parts are pretty much what you would expect based on the desktop product announcements, so if you're interested we invite you to read the official specifications (8400M & 8600M). It is relatively interesting to notice that the GeForce 8400M G has half the ALUs disabled but the texturing units are actually untouched. Amusing form of redundancy, and perhaps it even makes sense for the kind of games this card will likely be used for (The Sims 2, World of Warcraft, and old classics - all of which are mostly texture-intensive).

Recently, NVIDIA executives have claimed in a financial conference call that they expect to get a vast majority, if not 100% of the DX10 discrete GPU market share under Intel's upcoming Santa Rosa platform. ATI sources have denied this, however, indicating that they will indeed have design wins under Santa Rosa.

It will interesting to see what happens there, as NVIDIA has gone from very little share in laptops 2-3 years ago to more than 60% today. This time around, they will however have a process disadvantage (80nm vs 65nm) which might hurt their performance-per-watt rankings. The video decoding performance and image quality, as well as driver stability, are other important points for OEMs. If you're a gaming enthusiast and just want a card to play outside the house on the other hand, the 3D performance is obviously all you care about, and it shouldn't be too hard to estimate that based on the specifications released today.

Tagging

nvidia ± notebook, g84, g86

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