Date:
Thursday , October 12, 2006
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX Preview

NVIDIA is announcing the world’s fastest mobile gaming graphics processing unit. We explore the technology behind the GeForce Go 7950 GTX and break down the associated technologies.

continued...

Architecture

Article Image

The GeForce Go 7950 GTX’s shader configuration is made up of 24 pixel shader pipelines with 48 shader ALUs and 8 vertex shader units. This is exactly the same as the GeForce Go 7900 GTX and subsequently the desktop GeForce 7900 GTX as well. That means that on a base architecture level the GeForce Go 7900 GTX and GeForce Go 7950 GTX are exactly the same as the desktop GeForce 7900 GTX GPU.

Article Image

What makes the new GeForce Go 7950 GTX faster is a bump in core and memory clock speeds. The GeForce Go 7900 GTX has a core clock speed of 500 MHz. The new GeForce Go 7950 GTX has bumped this up to 575 MHz. For comparison the desktop GeForce 7900 GTX is clocked at 650 MHz. If we look at the fillrate comparison the GeForce Go 7900 GTX would have 12 GTexels/sec, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX would have 13.8 GTexels/sec and just for comparison a desktop GeForce 7900 GTX has 15.6 GTexels/sec.

NVIDIA has given a larger boost to the memory clock speeds on the new GeForce 7950 GTX. Both the GeForce Go 7900 GTX and GeForce Go 7950 GTX utilize 512MB of GDDR3. The GeForce Go 7900 GTX has a memory clock speed of 600 MHz (1.2 GHz). The new GeForce Go 7950 GTX bumps this up to 700 MHz (1.4 GHz). This is by far the fastest GPU memory clock speed in a laptop yet. Just for comparison the desktop GeForce 7900 GTX is clocked at 800 MHz (1.6 GHz). Looking at the memory bandwidth it works out like this, the GeForce Go 7900 GTX has 38.4 GB/sec of bandwidth, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX has 44.8 GB/sec and a desktop GeForce 7900 GTX has 51.2 GB/sec.

Power

You can see how much closer laptop GPUs have now come to the fastest high-end desktop GPUs, the architecture is exactly the same just clock speeds are slightly lower. Now, the largest concern with laptops is heat, battery life and power utilization. Herein lies the beauty of the GeForce Go 7950 GTX. The GeForce Go 7900 GTX draws 45W of power and amazingly NVIDIA has been able to maintain that same power draw with the new GeForce Go 7950 GTX. That’s right, it is clocked faster, yet sits in the same thermal and power envelope as the GeForce 7900 GTX.

The GeForce 7950 GTX is electrically, thermally and pin compatible with the GeForce 7900 GTX which should make it easy for laptop manufacturers to utilize the new GPU. One important feature that helps maintain power and heat is PowerMizer 6.0 which the GeForce Go 7900 GTX uses and thus so does the new GeForce Go 7950 GTX. PowerMizer 6.0 can control GPU voltage, clock speeds and gating within the GPU to reduce power and heat to help save on battery life.

SLI

While the GeForce Go 7950 GTX can be utilized as one individual GPU for great gaming performance it can also be used in an SLI configuration. At the Enthusiast/SLI category you will find the fastest gaming laptops on the planet. With two GeForce Go 7950 GTX GPUs in SLI it doesn’t get any faster for gaming on a laptop. This configuration is truly for those that want a desktop gaming replacement or the ultimate LANning machine. You do not want to run off the battery for gaming with these laptops and you certainly want to make sure they are in a well ventilated area.

Physics

Article Image Article Image

NVIDIA announced that their GPUs are capable of accelerating game physics this past March. We’ve also done our own research to learn just what exactly GPUs can do in terms of game physics. We found they are quite capable even today, able to accelerate effect and gameplay physics. However, it is up to the software developers and game content developers to actually utilize the hardware in this way. Thanks to Havok there is a physics API in place to allow physics acceleration.

Though we haven’t seen any games utilize this technology yet on GPUs NVIDIA is adamant that work is still underway on this front. This is relevant to the announcement today because with SLI in laptops the hardware will already be in place when games supporting physics acceleration via GPUs hit the market. The GeForce Go 7950 GTX, as far as the hardware goes, can support physics acceleration; it is all in the hands of the game content developers. Once the hardware is utilized physics acceleration will be available for not only desktops, but laptops as well.

Mobile GPU Hard Launch

One great thing NVIDIA is doing for the market place is providing hard launches of new GPUs. We see this on the desktop; almost every new GPU announcement has been followed by a hard launch, or at least has had availability within a week of announcement. NVIDIA is bringing that philosophy to the mobile side which is very exciting. No longer do you have to wait a long time to get your hands on the new graphics technology for laptops. NVIDIA has stated that laptops using the new GeForce Go 7950 GTX will be available in single GPU form immediately. However, SLI configurations will be coming a bit later.

Drivers

Article Image

NVIDIA is also on the ball about driver updates. For the longest time you have had to wait until your specific laptop manufacturer releases their own graphics driver for you to update with. With gaming frequent driver updates are needed. Not only can new drivers bring about better performance and utilization of hardware but they are also needed to fix game bugs as they arise in new games that are released. NVIDIA has been very good about keeping their desktop drivers updates fixing new bugs and bringing about better performance. This is also now available on the laptop side of things. For laptop manufacturers that participate with NVIDIA you will be able to download new drivers for your laptops GPU directly from NVIDIA.com.

Video

While the GeForce Go 7950 GTX is geared for gamers it can also do more than just gaming. The GeForce Go 7950 GTX does feature PureVideo HD. With PureVideo HD such things as H.264 decoding can be accelerated by the GPU thus reducing the load on the CPU. With this reduction in CPU utilization you can use your laptop to do more multi-tasking while decoding or encoding video. Even the latest and greatest Intel Core 2 Duo cannot match the performance of the GPU for decoding or encoding video.

Laptops

Article Image

All of this great technology is nothing without manufacturers embracing it. There are a number of key laptop manufacturers who will be offering solutions based on the GeForce Go 7950 GTX. Some of these include Dell, Alienware, Sager, Falcon Northwest, and Velocity Micro.