Nvidia Announces GeForce 800M Graphics Cards with Battery Boost for Laptops

Nvidia has officially announced its new generation of video cards for laptops. The 800M series consists of models with existing Kepler GPUs, but also models with new Maxwell chips. All GPUs receive support for the energy-saving Battery Boost technology.

The only GPU that comes exclusively with a Maxwell GPU is the GeForce GTX 850M: it has 640 cuda cores and is therefore made up of five SMX units: the Maxwell architecture provides 128 cores per SMX unit. The GTX 750 Ti for the desktop, which is based on the Maxwell architecture, also has 640 cudacores. The GeForce GTX 860M will also be released in a Maxwell configuration with 640 cuda cores, but there will also be variants with 1152 cores based on the Kepler architecture. It is not clear how consumers should be able to distinguish the two 860M variants in the laptop specifications.

In any case, the GPUs have better specifications than comparable models from the 700M line for the higher segment, which Nvidia released a year ago. Nvidia claims that the new GPUs perform 15 to 60 percent better, with the most powerful model, the GTX 880M, yielding the least gains with its higher clock speeds and the GTX 850M the most with its new architecture. Asus, MSI, Dell Alienware and Lenovo, among others, come up with new laptops with the GPUs.

All new models feature Nvidia Battery Boost. This is energy-saving technology that aims for a frame rate of 30 fps and does not burden the CPU, GPU and memory more than is necessary to achieve that goal. According to Nvidia, a battery life is twice as long as with Battery Boost turned off. The user could increase or decrease the desired base of 30 fps himself. It would be about more than just frame targeting, but the details are not disclosed by Nvidia.

In addition, the GPUs support Shadowplay for recording gameplay and there is support for GameStream. With the latter service, Nvidia tries to make streaming gameplay footage easy. For this, the manufacturer uses the h.264 encoder of its GPUs and self-developed algorithms for efficient streaming over WiFi and Ethernet. Initially, streaming will only work over Ethernet with 50 games and a limited number of routers will initially have the GameStream-Ready certificate. In the future, Wi-Fi support will be added and the number of games and certified routers will be supplemented.

Besides the GeForce GTX 880M, 870M, 860M and 850M for gaming laptops, multimedia models and other notebooks that require the necessary graphics processing power, the manufacturer also comes with the 840M and 830M for thinner laptops. These are both based on Maxwell, contain 64-bit interfaces and are equipped with a maximum of 2GB DDR3. All GPUs in the 800M series are produced at 28nm by TSMC.