Nvidia has been losing some ground to its rival AMD, with the competitor having a full lineup of powerful and DX11 ready mobile GPUs on the market for quite a while now. Just in time for the IFA trade show in Berlin, Nvidia is aiming to catch up – and possibly take over the lead – with an announcement of a major expansion of its mobile GPU lineup.
It is of course the long-awaited GeForce 400M “Fermi” series of DX11 compatible graphics cards, of which only the high-end GTX 480M has been available so far. The full series adds the more affordable high-end models GeForce GTX 470M and 460M, as well as the mid-range GeForce GT 445M, 435M, 425M, 420M and the lower-end 415M.
The new laptop graphics cards all feature the now familiar Optimus technology for seamless switching between the Intel IGP and the dedicated card and 3D Vision support. Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba have already announced their first models (more on this later on).
To use the Stereoscopic 3D technology you will still need 3D Vision goggles from NVIDIA and, more importantly, a 3D-capable 120Hz display. However, you can also connect your laptop to a 3DTV and use it to watch 3D movies.
Nvidia has dubbed the (not entirely) new set of features “Graphics Plus,” which includes the following:
* Support for NVIDIA 3D Vision
* PhysX support for realistic physics effects
* Support for CUDA GPGPU computing
* NVIDIA Verde Notebook Drivers for improving system stability and performance
* 3DTV-play software for connecting 3D vision-based laptops and desktop PCs to a 3D TV.
