Nvidia Unveils GTX 480M Graphics for Laptops

Nvidia Unveils GTX 480M Graphics for Laptops

Techtree News Staff, May 26, 2010 1450 hrs IST

New Fermi architecture based GPUs will support DirectX 11 but not stereoscopic 3D, PhysX

Nvidia has introduced its next generation Fermi computational graphics architecture to the mobile platform. In the near future, laptop models sporting Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M chip will support DirectX 11 level graphics. The new Nvidia Fermi based GTX 480M for laptops has more than three times CUDA Cores (stream processors) than its predecessor. Clevo would be the first to release GTX 480M based notebooks.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480M has the stripped down Fermi architecture based GF104 GPU chip. This new GF104 chip has 352 stream processors or CUDA cores and the graphics engine clocked at 850MHz. Nvidia didn't specify the amount of video memory used but stated that it will be clocked at 1200MHz and 256-bit memory bandwidth. The maximum theoretical output of this graphics unit would be 897 GigaFLOPS. However, there was no confirmation on the thermal design power rating of the GPU.

We don't know much battery life the GTX 480M based GPUs will offer, especially after using the Nvidia Optimus GPU-IGP graphics auto-switching technology.

Back in January, AMD had introduced ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 GPUs for the mobile platform. Nvidia must've impressed the consumers with boosted frequencies, but certain features would be compromised for that, like Stereoscopic-3D, PhysX support and others. Let's hope these new Green camp (Nvidia) GPUs give good competition to the red camp (ATI) GPUs on the mobile platform.