NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680M GPU Now Available

Just like Gigabyte revealed its flagship Z77-based motherboard yesterday, NVIDIA has officially introduced the latest and greatest of its mobile graphics products.

The new graphics processing units (GPU) from the Santa Clara, California-based company bears the name of GeForce GTX 680M. Obviously, it is the counterpart of the GeForce GTX 680 that desktop builders and DIY consumers have been buying for months. Spec-wise the mobile graphics chip has 1,344 CUDA cores, 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, a memory interface of 256 bits and a clock speed of 720 MHz for the GPU. One should also not forget about all the technologies built into the device, and we mean more than SLI (multi-GPU setups), PhysX and CUDA. For one, NVIDIA implemented the Adaptive V-sync technology, which changes a game setting from V-Sync on to V-Sync off depending on need. Normally, playing a game with V-Sync off lets said title exceed the native frame rate of a monitor, but this can cause screen tearing, when frames break in half or three parts (an annoying visual glitch).

Meanwhile, turning V-Sync on can cause the frame rate to drop from 60 to 30 fps randomly, as the framerate is locked to multiples of thirty in that mode, which means that if the game slides even just a little below 60, the monitor rate is forced down to 30 fps immediately. A second technology is Advanced AA (FXAA and TXAA), which we went into detail about back when the desktop GTX 680 came out. A third asset is the 3DTV Play software, which links notebooks to 3D TVs when the laptop screen just isn't large enough (likely on the smaller Alienware machines, to give one example). Speaking of which, Alienware, MSI and other mobile PC providers will come forward and launch notebooks equipped with the GTX 680M. There is no GPU price to impart for now though.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview