Few hours after NVIDIA launched the info about their new technology named Optimus, we got information about their intention to show a Fermi-based mobile graphics card on CeBIT, along with desktop cards. What is more interesting is the fact their most powerful new model will come before Q3 and it will consume as much as 100 watts, which puts it in direct competition with CrossFire enabled couples of Mobility Radeon HD5870 (which we are about to see very soon as well). Of course – people started to worry hearing about such high consumption, but rest assured – there will be less demanding cards for those that want something less powerful than the best.
Currently the only single-chip solution that requires above 75 watts is NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M, which we could hardly tell available since it is offered with very limited range of notebooks. Rather than investigating if it has any cooling problems we just had a look at the power consumption of those SLI and Crossfire beasties that you can find in many gaming notebooks – and they all offer 130+ W consumption (even a couple of HD5870 GDDR5 would require 120W, and it is nothing like the desktop HD5870…), so if the Fermi-based board is faster than those or at least equal – we will get a winner.
What is better is that there are going to be other, less demanding new cards. ATI offered huge variety ofMobility Radeon HD500 cards but all except HD5870 GDDR5 suffer from their slow memory to the point they can even cope with GTS 250M, which is low end gaming solution from NVIDIA at its end of life. And if those new cards all use Optimus to lower laptop’s 2D consumption, this is going to piss off ATI for sure, as they don’t offer instant switching at this moment (they only use hybrids in low end with HD4330 and such).
Lets wait and see…
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