NVIDIA GeForce 8800M: Fast DX10 Mobile GPUs Finally Arrive
by Jarred Walton on November 19, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
DirectX 10 Games and Initial Performance Estimates
Up until recently, the need for DirectX 10 hardware has been debatable - only a few titles have even supported DirectX 10, and performance has often been too slow to warrant consideration. With the holiday season in full swing, however, top-end DirectX 9 hardware from last year is now beginning to seriously struggle on many titles. Recent releases such as Crysis and Hellgate: London are just the tip of the iceberg. DirectX 10 mode might still be too much for many graphics cards to handle, but the latest DX10 hardware is also substantially faster at running DX9 code. The following slide shows the growing list of DX10 enabled games.
Huxley and Call of Duty 4 could also be included in that list, and there are many more titles scheduled for release in the next year that will continue to push GPU requirements.
So just how fast is the GeForce 8800M GTX? As mentioned, we were unable to test one in person at this point in time, but we will provide detailed results as soon as possible. In the meantime, here are a few quick slides from NVIDIA showing preliminary performance results. Note that we are not in control of the test variables for the following slides, and the first 3DMark06 slide includes three different CPU speeds (2.8GHz for 8800M, 2.2GHz for 8700M, and 2.0GHz for 7950 GTX). As gaming continues to be predominantly GPU limited, however, these baseline performance estimates should at least whet your appetite.
It appears that we should be able to get approximately twice the performance of the GeForce Go 7950 GTX (and more than twice the 8700M GT) with the 8800M GTX, which brings laptops back into striking range of desktop computers. A single 8800M GTX should also be roughly the same speed as GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI, without the hassles of SLI drivers and profiles. For those that simply demand top performance, we can expect 8800M SLI configurations to improve performance again by up to 80% - just don't worry about battery life on such notebooks.
Up until recently, the need for DirectX 10 hardware has been debatable - only a few titles have even supported DirectX 10, and performance has often been too slow to warrant consideration. With the holiday season in full swing, however, top-end DirectX 9 hardware from last year is now beginning to seriously struggle on many titles. Recent releases such as Crysis and Hellgate: London are just the tip of the iceberg. DirectX 10 mode might still be too much for many graphics cards to handle, but the latest DX10 hardware is also substantially faster at running DX9 code. The following slide shows the growing list of DX10 enabled games.
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Huxley and Call of Duty 4 could also be included in that list, and there are many more titles scheduled for release in the next year that will continue to push GPU requirements.
So just how fast is the GeForce 8800M GTX? As mentioned, we were unable to test one in person at this point in time, but we will provide detailed results as soon as possible. In the meantime, here are a few quick slides from NVIDIA showing preliminary performance results. Note that we are not in control of the test variables for the following slides, and the first 3DMark06 slide includes three different CPU speeds (2.8GHz for 8800M, 2.2GHz for 8700M, and 2.0GHz for 7950 GTX). As gaming continues to be predominantly GPU limited, however, these baseline performance estimates should at least whet your appetite.
It appears that we should be able to get approximately twice the performance of the GeForce Go 7950 GTX (and more than twice the 8700M GT) with the 8800M GTX, which brings laptops back into striking range of desktop computers. A single 8800M GTX should also be roughly the same speed as GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI, without the hassles of SLI drivers and profiles. For those that simply demand top performance, we can expect 8800M SLI configurations to improve performance again by up to 80% - just don't worry about battery life on such notebooks.
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xantha - Monday, March 17, 2008 - link
Just to add what was already mentioned in the article - gaming notebooks in Australia are more affordable than many may realise if you are using salary sacrifice. This is where the cost of the laptop is taken out of your pay prior to tax being calculated - effectively reducing the cost of the laptop by 40%.In addition you dont have to pay the GST portion so thats another 10%.
So the $4000 laptop now becomes $3636 without the GST - of which you were going to be losing $1454 to the government even if you didn't buy anything. Making the laptop only $2184...god I love our tax laws sometimes :D
Stas - Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - link
More improvements for $4K laptops... Too bad I couldn't care less.SilthDraeth - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
Why don't you compare this head to head against a ATI mobility 2600XT? Instead you compare it only to other Nvidia mobile cards, and then tell us it's better than ATI.JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
Probably because I don't have one to compare it against? I don't even have the 8800M laptop right now - I tried to make it clear that those preliminary results are straight from NVIDIA; I'm waiting for a laptop still.That said, X2600 XT and 8600 GTS are relatively close in performance on the desktop, and there's no reason placing should change on laptops. Similarly, there's a huge gulf in performance between 8600 GTS / 2600 XT and the 8800 GT, which we should also see on the mobile side.
SilthDraeth - Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - link
Sorry Jared. I went and posted without fully reading the article.Inkjammer - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
The 15.4" laptop is the Alienware m15X that's been leaked from Alienware's newest ad campaign. The estimated date of release was supposed to be November 19th, but they didn't get up yesterday.Alienware announced a new 15.4 and 17" gaming laptop, one with the 8800m, the other an SLI Santa Rosa update for the m9750. Initial news of it broke out on www.notebookreview.com.
her34 - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
what is the idle power consumption of igp like intel?
JarredWalton - Monday, November 19, 2007 - link
As it's part of the NB, it's not really possibly to pull out a separate power figure. Generally, the IGP Northbridge chips don't use much more power at idle than the regular non-IGP NB chips, so IGP at idle is almost "free" graphics. I'd guess that total IGP power use at idle is around 1W, maybe.Lonyo - Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - link
Is there any news of new ATi mobile chips? I would assume with the move to 55nm they c ould get reasonable performance in a mobile package.Also, as asked earlier, how do you post a new comment instead of a reply?
fus3d - Saturday, November 24, 2007 - link
ATI probably will release a rv670 mobile equivalent.