Today gaming notebook makers around the world begin shipping systems decked out with Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 GPUs, essentially the same Pascal-based graphics hardware introduced for desktop PCs earlier this year. The line, it grows thinner.
Mobile PC gaming is always a compromise between portability and performance, but it’s much less of a compromise today than it’s been in ages. Instead of slapping an “M” to the end of its next generation 10x series of graphics cards and releasing them as watered down versions, Nvidia’s latest mobile graphics cards are simply to GTX 1080, GTX 1070 and GTX 1060, with power comparable to their full-sized counterparts.
All of the features of the desktop cards are intact, from VRWorks with its Simultaneous Multi-Projection technology to Ansel’s entertaining capture options.
Our friends over at Techspot recently attended an event in London introducing the new laptop cards, and the tests they ran on outfitted systems yielded impressive results. The hardware is the same as that found in the Founder’s Editions of the GTX 10x series, and it performs just as well, though Nvidia expects 10 percent less performance, likely due to thermal and power constraints.
Notebook PC gaming aficionados can get their hands on systems powered by these three cards today, as every single gaming notebook maker I know has emailed me to let me know they are now shipping. Asus, Xotic, Sysber, CybertronPC—everybody.
As a fan of portable PC gaming in the market for a new laptop (still rocking that depressing Lenovo Yoga Pro), this is a very exciting development. VR ready laptops with 4K screens that can actually run games at 4K? Sign me up.