nVidia just presented GeForce GTX 480M Fermi Mobile GPU. It’s more of a underclocked GeForce GTX 465 (to be presented soon), and will offer typically 50% of a GeForce GTX 480 desktop performance-level.
Still it’s largely over the last-generation GeForce GTX 285M that was just a GeForce 9800GTX in disguise, showing that GT200 GPU (GTX260..295) is just inadequate to be used on mobile platforms or downsized for middle-level gamer videocards!
The most interesting thing is not the gaming performance, and it will be impressive, on a par with my desktop GTX 260 or better, but Fermi being available on (huge) laptops. With real-world OpenCL & CUDA performance-level that is really impressive.
If you compare this laptop GPU to desktop CPU, for example with Folding@home distributed supercomputing projet, created for CPU and ported to GPU on nVidia’s CUDA and ATI’s brooke(n) technology you will have to compare with:
- 3 desktop Core i7 high-end CPU (or 6 laptop Core i7 Mobile CPU!)
- 2 Radeon 5870 desktop GPU (or a 5970 desktop GPU)
The raw numbers are more impressive on Radion HD 5xxx GPU, but the real-life OpenCL performance (and CUDA too) is almost unbeatable when you took CPU-developped programs ported to GPU!
And it’s a mobile GPU! I would like to see a PC card with it, to consume 2X less than my GTX 260 while offering better performance-level and Fermi computing ability 