Revolutionary? You be the judge. But NVIDIA has launched new GPUs for mobile devices like notebooks, which the company claims deliver up to 2.5 times the performance of Intel UHD 620 Graphics.
And launched them quietly, with barely any fanfare.
The GeForce MX130 and MX110 graphics processing units are based on the Maxwell architecture, and offer an energy efficient solution for entry level mobile products — laptops, hybrids, tablets, 2-in-1s and even some slim ultrabooks.
They make use of the 28nm process technology, but still deliver a big boost over the competition in terms of performance per watt, which makes total sense for mobility product designs.
Both use the Maxwell GM108 GPU, and the two chips come in 25W variants as GeForce MX 130 and GeForce MX 110. These sit alongside the NVIDIA GeForce MX 150, which has quickly become a fairly popular and very capable solution for budget laptops that are good enough for light gaming on the go.
The former is said to deliver 2.5x performance improvement over Intel UHD 620 Graphics, while the latter is good enough for a 1.5x improvement.
And in case you are not aware, Intel UHD 620 Graphics is the graphics chip that ships with the powerful new 8th generation Intel processors that are now flooding the market.
These new GeForce chips, meanwhile, are DirectX 12 compliant, and also offer support for OpenGL 4.5 APIs and full NVIDIA GameWorks support. There is a big market for solutions like these, and if the company can price and position these well, they have quite the potential to disrupt proceedings.
We may well and truly see most laptops being able to play games at medium settings.
And perhaps even Windows 10 powered tablets, and hybrids.
