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The PC
Graphics Industry certainly has been heating up over the
past few weeks, to say the least. NVIDIA and ATi alone are
making coverage, of their new technologies for the desktop
alone, a full time job. In addition however,
coincident with Intel's
"Centrino" Launch and Mobile/Wireless initiative, the
Mobile Graphics space is bubbling and buzzing as well.
ATi gave us a taste of their new "M10" core, with an
intimate demo of their
Mobility Radeon 9600. In like fashion,
very recently we were briefed on NVIDIA's new GeForce FX
products for the Laptop, the GeForce FX Go5200 and GeForce
FX Go5600 GPUs. What's really exciting about all of
this new Mobile Graphics technology coming down the pipe,
is they don't make any compromises versus their mainstream
Desktop counterparts.
Let's have a
look at the basic feature-set of these new NVIDIA "Go"
Graphics Processors...
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Specifications & Features of the NVIDIA GeForce
FX Go 5200 and 5600 GPUs |
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DX9
Gaming On The Road |
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THE GEFORCE Go FX 5200
and 5600
Like we
said, "no compromises"... It may sound like a
cliche'-ish marketing term but truly, if you look at
the features and specifications of the above devices,
even the speeds and feeds, there is little difference
between the Mobile and the Desktop solution. All
GeForce FX devices, whether they be Mobile or Desktop,
support AGP 8X, full DirectX 9 compliance, Pixel and
Vertex Shaders version 2.0, can process 16 textures
per pass, provide Z-Cull Hidden Surface Removal and
run with NVIDIA's Unified Driver Architecture.
The GFFX Go5200 doesn't support Color or Z-Compression
but the 5200 desktop version doesn't as well.
The 5200 is NVIDIA's most cost efficient solution and
those engines were stripped out of the chips, to
reduce die size and cost. Like the 5600 desktop
chip, NVIDIA reports that the Go5600 will run up to
350MHz and support up to 700MHZ DDR2 memory.
Likewise, flavors of the Go5200 will scale up to
300MHz, just like their
desktop counterpart.
However,
obviously NVIDIA needs to provide a power
regulation/conservation mechanism, as they have with
their GeForce 4 Go product line. As such, "PowerMiser
3.0" has been announced, as an integral part of the
GeForce FX Go architecture...
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PowerMiser 3.0 -
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Aggressive clock gating design
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Enhanced, intelligent clock management
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Low voltage 0.13um process
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Dynamic voltage scaling
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Lowest CPU utilization for longest DVD
playback
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Long battery life even with 3D
applications
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Automatic detection of AC or battery
NVIDIA is
claiming the GeForce FX Go GPUs are significantly more
power efficient than previous GeForce 4 Go products and
actually consume much less power, while offering
exponential performance and image quality improvements.
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Enhanced VPE - Video Processing Engine |
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DVD Looking
Better and Better At Cruising Altitude |
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In addition,
the GeForce FX Go offers enhanced Video Processing
capabilities, over the GeForce 4 Go, with full MPEG 2
hardware decode stack and encode assist.
Motion
artifacts should be cleaned up significantly, with this
new NVIDIA Mobile Graphics solution, since Adaptive
De-Interlacing support, versus the standard bob and weave
approach, has been added in. This was an area where
NVIDIA was lacking versus ATi in the past and it's good to
see it on the feature list. Hopefully this will
translate to significantly better DVD video image quality.
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Dedicated Gaming Support From EA |
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EA thinks it's
the way it was meant to be played... |
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An interesting
spin that NVIDIA put on the ball, with this launch, is an
announcement they are making with
Electronic
Arts, for exclusive support of their Mobile Graphics
Hardware and EA Games.
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Exclusive NVIDIA
mobile GPU feature designed into EA games
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NVIDIA Mobile GPUs
tested before EA content is released.
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NVIDIA is EA?s mobile
reference test standard.
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NVIDIA & EA
collaborate to ensure new game patches and driver
releases are supported and work after the content is
released.
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NVIDIA has exclusive
distribution rights to top EA Titles:
Tiger Woods 2003
Madden 2003
Battlefield 1942
Bond Nightfire
NASCAR Thunder 2003
NHL 2003....and more
These are some
pretty bold claims being made here by NVIDIA and even more
bold, is the move EA is making here, associating their
product with a specific Graphics Hardware Vendor of
choice. That's not to say that these EA Games won't
run on non-NVIDIA hardware. However, we were told EA
will have a much stronger support structure for NVIDIA
hardware, with respect to mobile graphics, and has given
NVIDIA exclusive distribution rights to bundle various
titles in with GeForce FX Go Graphics kits for Mobile PC
OEMs.
And so, we've
been shown both of the main player's hands this week, in
the Mobile Graphics game. If Intel has the kind of
influence with Centrino, that they traditionally have had
in general, we'll all be doing a whole lot more Mobile
Computing in the future. Thankfully, the powers that
be in the the 3D Graphics/Gaming arena, also have a
strategy that looks quite impressive. Both NVIDIA
and ATi are bringing forth technologies that will blur the
lines between Desktop and Mobile - Gaming, Multimedia and
Video performance. We've seen what ATi's new
Mobility Radeon 9600 can do first hand. We're
looking forward to seeing what a GeForce FX Go 5600 can
do, when it's cranked up to high res and pushing Doom 3
polygons. Make no mistake, Laptops are certainly not
just for spreadsheets and word processing anymore.
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this or any other Hot Hardware Review in the PC Hardware
Forum!
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