If there is one company that takes enhancing the user’s graphics experience and taking it to the next level seriously, it is without doubt Nvidia. And their latest offering is once again going to blow your (gaming) minds away. Nvidia has launched its best mobile gaming GPU yet, it’s light years ahead of the rest of the pack. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 680M is here.
Launched at Computex, held earlier this week in Taipei, and winner of the Best Choice Award in the IC & Components division, the GTX 680M is the mobile cousin of the desktop version and is as close to a high-end desktop GPU as anything has ever been. It brings the much acclaimed Nvidia Kepler architecture to the highest end of their GPU line-up. I have said it before and just to drive the point home, I will say it again the Kepler-based GPU is going to blow your minds away. I know all you high-end gaming Ninjas can’t wait to scrutinize the specs on this GPU, so here they are:-
- The GTX 680M core is manufactured at 28nm and includes an incredible (hold your breath) 1344 cores at 720MHz. You can read that line again, it wasn’t a typo, it is indeed 1344 cores.
- The GPU supports up to 4GB of GDDR5 RAM with a clock rate of 3.6GHz running on a 256bit memory bus, and a bandwidth of 115.2GB/s.
- It also boasts of the Industry defining, lightning-fast anti-aliasing, with NVIDIA FXAA.
- Then there is the brand new TXAA smoothing technology that delivers the ultimate combination of image quality and performance.
- And the NVIDIA Adaptive Vertical Sync automatically adjusts VSync to eliminate screen tearing.
- To put the icing on the cake, in comes the automatic battery saving NVIDIA Optimus technology.
To a lot of gamers these numbers and specifications mean a lot, but just to put things in perspective, as a point of comparison the next best GPUs currently out there in the market are –
- 40nm Fermi-based GTX 675M which uses 384 cores running at 620MHz, and
- The new Kepler-based GTX 660M running 384 cores at 835MHz.
Notice the difference in graphics compute cores? there is the 384 core GTX 660M and then there is this new beast the 1,344 core GTX 680M. And there is nothing in between. Nvidia still hasn’t announced a mobile GPU with a core count between these two extremes.
This GPU is currently available on a new Alienware M17X, with NVIDIA Optimus or NVIDIA 3D Vision. Also available on MSI’s GT70 and Clevo’s P170EM. So basically that is the fastest notebook GPU on the planet that we are talking about. But wait, the thing with most gamers like myself is that we like pushing the boundaries, we like hurting our thumbs and feeling invincible every once in a while, Nvidia understands that and so does Alienware.
So they decided to better the fastest mobile gaming GPU on the planet and bring to you what would easily qualify as the fastest gaming GPU in the whole wide Universe. If you want a dual GeForce GTX 680M GPU for the fastest notebook graphics solution ever then you can go for Alienware’s M18x which will ship with dual GPUs configured in SLI mode. As for the pricing, Alienware, MSI, and other mobile PC providers will come forward and launch notebooks equipped with the GTX 680M. Therefore there is no GPU price to impart for now.
As mind-blowing as the specs are, you can be rest assured that Nvidia would be working on a new range of super-high-end GPUs already, bring them on we say. Personally, I have always rated Nvidia as the most innovative company going around, even if Apple, Google, and Microsoft might disagree, more on that in an upcoming post, but with this beast of a GPU, they prove me right again.
