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| Nvidia’s GTX 800M Brings Improved Kepler And Maxwell Cores To Mobile, New Battery Boost Driver To Gouble Gaming Battery Life |
We’ve previewed Nvidia’s GTX 800M (Maxwell) performance before, but today the company is making the launch official. The new GTX 800 Mobile series will introduce Maxwell to the mobile gaming world — but Nvidia isn’t just pushing a new GPU with this update. It’s also designed a new software suite it calls Battery Boost, and promises that the new mode can dramatically improve battery life when used on laptops… and perhaps other battery-powered systems in the future.
The Kepler/Maxwell conundrum
One of the big questions laptop buyers are going to have is which chips actually containMaxwell DNA. The answer is a bit complicated. The GeForce 830M and 840M are both Maxwell. So is the GTX 850M and some of the GTX 860Ms. Nvidia will be selling two different flavors of the GTX 860M — an 1152-core GPU flavor based on Kepler and clocked at 797MHz (+ Boost), and a 640-core variant based on Maxwell, running at up to 1029MHz (+ Boost). According to Nvidia, both cards should offer roughly identical performance — based on what we’ve seen of Maxwell on the desktop, that’s a reasonably fair assumption.
Nvidia is still claiming significant performance improvements for the 800M family as a whole thanks to significant tweaks to the existing Kepler cards. The 880M (Kepler) gets a clock jump (954MHz + Boost, up from 823MHz on the 780M), and the 870M (Kepler) is 941MHz and 1344 cores, up from 719MHz and 1344 cores with the GTX 775M. Those are significant improvements within the same TDP band; Nvidia claims the improvements are possible thanks to a more mature process and better binning.
Battery Boost brings better longevity
Probably the biggest feature Nvidia is announcing today is Battery Boost. Battery Boost is a software solution that interfaces with the GPU and the game in question to maximize battery life. It does this by setting a fame rate cap, adjusting the level of detail, and incorporating a number of additional changes that reduce the total amount of power the system consumes.
Nvidia specifies a 30 FPS default frame rate for Battery Boost, but notes that this is completely user-configurable — if you want to play at higher frame rates, you can always tweak the game to allow it. Battery Boost can be engaged automatically when the system drops to battery power, or can be configured on a per-game basis. Nvidia does note that you’ll need to launch a game from the desktop take advantage of BB — actually adjusting game detail levels automatically from within the title proved to be extremely difficult.
Unfortunately, Nvidia isn’t giving much of the other details away at this point. The company states that frame rate targeting is only part of the savings, claiming that BB “further enhances the GPU, CPU, and memory efficiency during frame rendering, saving power every frame. Our innovative algorithms allow the notebook components to operate at peak efficiency for the chosen frame targets, leading to additional battery savings that frame rate targeting alone cannot provide.”
That sounds like aggressive clock tuning to us, which would fit with BB’s overall goals. If you know you can pull the GPU down to a 30 FPS frame target, you can probably downclock various other components. This lets you trim voltages in turn, which pulls down heat generation and improves overall efficiency. Nvidia isn’t giving many details, but the company suggests that certain games can see larger gains from Battery Boost than others. Games like League Of Legends supposedly can see nearly double the playtime, while the benefits in a GPU-intense game like Crysis are more modest.
Battery Boost will be available on higher-end GeForce 800M cards and on “select” older models.
ShadowPlay
The final feature Nvidia is talking up today is new to the notebook segment — Nvidia ShadowPlay. This is Nvidia’s technology for recording gameplay streams, and if that’s what you actually want to do, it works well enough. I’ve used it before for making videos, and I’ll say this — the recording quality is superior to a software-only solution like Fraps, and the file sizes are much smaller (while remaining high quality).
ShadowPlay can automatically capture the last 20 minutes of your gameplay with the press of a button (Nvidia calls this Shadow Mode) or can be manually engaged and disengaged. If you follow the company’s work on desktops, you’ve seen this before.
As much as I love gaming — and I’ve been playing games since 1987 — I can’t stand watching other people play. Unless they’re exceptionally good at recording, editing, and commenting on the final product. Nevertheless, the explosive growth around Twitch and Ustream suggests that this is an increasingly popular market. As such, it’s good that Nvidia is extending the feature into the mobile space.
As we’ve said before, Maxwell is going to put serious pressure on AMD’s product lines, particularly in mobile, where price cuts may not offset superior TDP savings. NV has said that it will introduce “second-generation” Maxwell products later this year, though opinions are divided on whether that hardware will be built on 20nm or 28nm.
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