Hardware Nvidia Optimus: More Than Meets The Eye

looks fine and dandy, but the last time Nvidia came out with "multiple graphic solution" (SLI) was years ago and up to today they still haven't ironed all the bugs...
i kno theyre different things, but i just cant help myself to compare the two...

 

Actually, it had nothing to do with AMD/ATi or Ruddy Fuddy so it was bulls**t free.

 

I might be totally off course, but wouldn't the constant copying of data to 2 sets of memory shorten battery life all around?
IGP's running and it's wasting power copying stuff to the descrete's memory. and same the other way round.

Wouldn't the manual solution be better as long as either could be turned completely off without the whole rebooting mess?

 

The Asus UL50vf with a six cell battery gets about 9 hours battery life in the tests I've done...

 

you make it sound like it takes huge gobs of energy to copy information to and from ram. Also as i understand it the second chip would be shut down, even shutting it down for say 30 seconds or a minute would save more energy than it would take to keep the ram going for 10minutes. Ram is only a few watts a video card can top 100.

the only thing going manual would do is let you control when it switches rather than have an algorithm do it for you. You wouldn't be able to get that instant switch feature unless the ram is updated.

 

it looks so sweet come on AMD!!!!!! This is a feature I will give my business to Nvidia for which I don't want to do.....

 

Maybe this will work with Intel's Sandy Bridge, and they are just testing it in the laptops for now. Now that nVidia done this Optimus thing, AMD will surely follow...

 

Spot all the hidden Transformers references for 200 Bindi rep points!

 

Eh? It's just Hybrid SLI/Crossfire V2, the only significant improvement they've made is that a re-boot isn't required to switch from integrated to discrete. Yeah some extra battery life is always a good thing, but considering all nVidia's mobile GPU's are pretty dire anyways what's the point getting excited now? Maybe once they have mobile Fermi chips out (lolololololol) it'll be worth looking at, but with the mobile 300 series just being re-named 200 series (which themselves are just G92 based re-brands) I struggle to see the importance as of yet....

 

I understand that ram takes very little power. What i was pointing out was that if the user was intending to do work and thus was purely using IGP, the battery life would be shorter than the usual IGP only solution. And vice versa for a gamer on the go. Still, guess having battery life somewhere between the two isn't that bad.

Anyways, somehow i got the impression that the descrete was not totally shut off. If it was, could you still access the ram on it? Dosen't matter i guess, purely speculation on our part. We'll see when it does appear in a laptop.

 

megatron going to be demoted to starscream.. looks interesting for a notebook

 

I'm interested. And that's something I haven't said about Nvidia mobile GPU's for a long time. As long as you can force older games to use the dedicated GPU without having to manually change the settings every time, then I'd happily use this.

 

Whoooooooooooooooooooa! oh! oh! oh! oh! oh!

Anyone that tells me why I done that gets +rep

 

Eh? Yes we can't have Nvidia coming out with something really positive in the notebook market can we? AMD have no decent notebook products so any development from anybody is better than nothing.