Mobile Maxwell: NVIDIA Outs GeForce GTX 980M, GeForce GTX 970M Preview

by Dave Altavilla — Tuesday, October 07, 2014, 09:19 AM EDT

When NVIDIA launched the powerful GTX 980 and 970 last month, it was obvious that these cards would be coming to mobile sooner rather than later. The significant leap forward that Maxwell offers in performance-per-watt means that these GPUs would shine in mobile contexts -- maybe even more than in desktop.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M Maxwell Mobile Graphics Chip

Mobile Maxwell: NVIDIA Outs GeForce GTX 980M, 970M

Today, NVIDIA is putting paid to that hypothesis with two new mobile GPUs -- the GeForce GTX 970M and 980M. Both cards are based on Maxwell's 28nm architecture, and both are trimmed slightly from the full desktop implementation. The GeForce GTX 980M is a 1536-core chip (just like the GTX 680 / 680M) while the GTX 970 will pack 1280 cores. Clock speeds are 1038MHz base for the GTX 980M and 924MHz for the GTX 970M -- significantly faster than the GTX 680M's launch speeds.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, Gaming, Mobile, graphics, GPU, NASDAQ:NVDA

David Altavilla

Dave Altavilla is the founder, Editor In Chief and Publisher of HotHardware.com. With decades of experience as a semiconductor sales engineer, Dave Altavilla founded HotHardware.com over 25 years ago. Dave is also a published contributor to various technology-based publications and is a featured Tech Analyst expert on various network media shows.