Every year NVIDIA launches quite a few new products; some are better than others, but they're all interesting. This fall, the big news is Maxwell 2.0, aka GM204. Initially launched last month as the GTX 980 and GTX 970, NVIDIA is hopefully changing the way notebook gamers get treated by launching the mobile version of the GM204 just one month later.

We've already covered all of the new features in the desktop launch, so things like DSR, FXAA, VXGI, DX12, and GameWorks are all part of the notebook launch marketing materials. Of course, as a notebook GPU there are a few extra features available that you don't see on desktop GPUs, mostly because such features aren't really needed. Optimus Technology has been around for several years now so there's not much to add; it allows laptops to dynamically switch between the lower power integrated graphics when you're not doing anything that requires a faster GPU, and it can turn on and utilize the faster discrete NVIDIA GPU when needed. BatteryBoost is a related technology that was first introduced with the GTX 800M series of GPUs, and it seeks to improve gaming battery life. Our test platform at the time didn't really give us the gains we were hoping to see, but NVIDIA assures us that the new GM204 mobile graphics chips will do much better at providing decent battery life while running games. We'll be diving into this in more detail once we get our test notebooks.

Speaking of which, no, we don't have a notebook yet. It was supposed to arrive late last week but ended up shipping Monday instead, which means it should be arriving about the time you're reading this. We'll be posting a separate look at gaming performance as soon as we're able, and we'll have a full review of the MSI GT72 in the coming week as well. For now, what we have are specifications for the mobile versions of GM204 and an overview of what to expect from the mobile versions of NVIDIA's new GPU.

If you've been following the computing industry to any degree over the past few years, a few trends are clearly becoming ever more important. One is that many PC desktop users are migrating to laptops and notebooks, but perhaps just as important is the migration of PC users to smartphones and tablets. There are numerous reasons for the shift – convenience along with increasing performance from handheld devices – but the result is a reduction in the growth of the PC industry. The good news for NVIDIA is that gaming notebooks are still a growing market, though how you define a "gaming notebook" is certainly something that can be manipulated.

NVIDIA's own figures show a 5X growth in gaming notebook sales during the past three years, so clearly there's a demand for getting more graphics performance into laptops. In fact, that's generally the number one desire from notebook gamers: "I want desktop class performance!" NVIDIA is aiming to do just that with the launch of the GTX 980M and GTX 970M.

Closing the Performance Gap with Desktops

If we look back at the past several generations of GPUs from NVIDIA, the GTX 480 launched in March 2010 and had 480 CUDA cores clocked at 700 MHz with a 384-bit memory interface and 3.7GHz GDDR5 (177.4 GB/s). The mobile counterpart GTX 480M officially launched just a couple months later (though it wasn't really available for purchase for at least another month), but it was a rather different beast. It used the same core chip (GF100) but with a cut-down configuration of 352 cores clocked at 425 MHz and a 256-bit memory interface clocked at 3.0GHz. In terms of performance, it was about 40-45% as fast as the desktop chip. GTX 580 came out in November 2010, with 512 cores now clocked at 772 MHz and 4GHz GDDR5; GTX 580M appeared seven months later in June 2011 with 384 cores at 620 MHz and 3GHz GDDR5, and it used a different chip this time (GF114 vs. GF110). Performance was now around 45-55% of the desktop part.

The story was similar though improved in some ways with GTX 680 and GTX 680M. 680M had 1344 cores at 720 MHz with 3.6GHz GDDR5 while GTX 680 had 1536 cores at up to 1058 MHz with 6GHz GDDR5. They were three months apart and now the mobile chip was around 55-65% of the desktop GPU. GTX 780/780M were basically announced at the same time (though mobile hardware showed up about a month later, in June 2013), and as with 580/580M the notebook part used a smaller chip than the desktop (GK104 vs. GK110). The performance offered was again around 55-65% of the desktop part. Then of course there's GTX 880M, which is sort of the counterpart to GTX 780 Ti. It uses a full GK104 (1536 cores) while 780 Ti uses a full GK110 (2880 cores), and the delay between the 780 Ti and the 880M launches was four months, and while the desktop GPUs never saw the 800 series, GTX 880M is down to around 50-60% of the top desktop GPU, the GTX 780 Ti.

That brings us to today's launch of the GTX 980M/970M. You might say that there have been patterns emerging over the past few years that hint where NVIDIA is going – e.g. Kepler GK107 first launched on laptops back in March 2012, with desktop GPUs coming a month later – but the higher performance parts have almost always been desktop first and mobile several months later, with at best 50-65% of the performance. Now just one month after NVIDIA launched the GTX 980 and 970, they're bringing out the mobile counterparts. What's more, while the mobile chips are yet again cut-down versions of the desktop GPUs, clocks are still pretty aggressive and NVIDIA claims the 980M will deliver around 75% of the performance of the GTX 980. Here's a look at the specifications of the new mobile GPUs.

The specifications are actually a bit of a surprise, as the core clocks on the 980M are right there with the desktop parts (though it may or may not boost as high). The 980M ends up with 75% of the CUDA cores of the GTX 980 while the memory clock is 29% lower. In terms of pure theoretical compute power, the 980M on paper is going to be 70-75% of the GTX 980. Of course that's only on paper, and actual gaming performance depends on several factors: GPU shader performance and GPU memory bandwidth are obviously important, but the CPU performance, resolution, settings, and choice of game are just as critical. In some games at some settings, the 980M is very likely to deliver more than 75% of the GTX 980's performance; other games and settings may end up closer to 70% or less of the desktop. Regardless, this is as close as NVIDIA has ever come to having their top notebook GPU match their top desktop GPU.

A big part of this is the focus on efficiency with Maxwell GM204. NVIDIA doesn't disclose TDP for their mobile parts, but the top mobile GPUs usually target 100W. NVIDIA went after efficiency in a big way with Maxwell 2, dropping TDP from 250W with GTX 780 Ti down to 165W with GTX 980, all while delivering a similar (often slightly better) level of performance. With further binning and refinements to help create a notebook GPU, the TDP target would be 60% of the GTX 980 and power requirements tend to scale quite a bit near the maximum stable clocks for any particular microprocessor. Reduce the memory clocks a bit and disable some of the SMM units and getting 75% of the performance with 60% of the power requirement shouldn't be too difficult to pull off.

Moving on to the GTX 970M, NVIDIA is still using GM204 but it has even more SMM units disabled leaving it with 1280 CUDA cores. The memory bus has also been dropped to a 192-bit interface, but with a slightly lower core clock and fewer cores to feed, the GTX 970M should do well with a 192-bit bus. The smaller memory bus also translates into less total memory this round, so NVIDIA isn't doing any asymmetrical memory interface on the 970M; it will have 3GB GDDR5 standard, with an option to go with 6GB. It's good to see the potential to get more than 3GB RAM, as we're already seeing a few games that are moving past that target.

In terms of theoretical compute performance (cores * clock speed), the GTX 980M will be about 30-35% faster than the GTX 970M in GPU-bound situations. If you're curious, the GTX 970M will also offer around 55-65% of the performance of the desktop GTX 970, so the second tier GPU ends up being closer to what we've seen with previous generations of NVIDIA mobile GPUs.

With the launch of the new GTX 970M and GTX 980M, it's also worth mentioning that NVIDIA is officially discontinuing some of the existing mobile parts. The current lineup of mobile GPUs from NVIDIA now consists of GeForce 820M, 830M, and 840M for the casual/less demanding market. The 820M is actually a Fermi-derived part, while 830M and 840M use GM108 with 256 and 384 cores, respectively. At the top of the product stack, the GTX 980M and 970M replace the GTX 880M and 870M, while GTX 860M and 850M continue as the "mainstream gaming" notebook GPUs; 860M also continues to be offered in two variants, a Maxwell GM107 version and a Kepler GK104 version, though the latter hasn't been widely used.

GTX 980M and 970M Notebooks and Conclusion

Today's launch of 980M and 970M is about as much of a "hard launch" as we see with notebook GPUs. Quite a few notebooks should be available for order with the new chips, though it could take a couple weeks or more for orders to process. We were hoping to have the MSI GT72 prior to today's launch, but as noted earlier it should arrive in the next day (or in a few hours even). We'll post a follow-up Pipeline article as soon as we're able showing performance using some of our standard gaming and graphics benchmarks. In the meantime, here's the current list of notebooks that support the new GPUs.

For their part, NVIDIA has provided performance numbers for both GPUs at different settings in a variety of games, but there's no comparison with other GPUs so the numbers are out of context. As a preview of what to expect, and considering several of the games use the built-in benchmark tools, here's what NVIDIA is reporting; all of the following games were tested at 1080p with the settings indicated:

Most of the games are apparently being run at near maximum quality settings (though Batman is missing 4xMSAA, it does have PhysX enabled), which is good for putting as much of the bottleneck on the GPU as possible. StarCraft II and Hitman Absolution appear to be CPU limited, which isn't too surprising for StarCraft II as it has always been heavily influenced by CPU performance. On average, the GTX 980M outperforms the GTX 970M by 28%, even including the CPU limited games; if we ignore StarCraft II and Hitman Absolution the 980M is 34% faster on average.

Update: our own performance preview of GTX 980M is now available. The short summary is that GTX 980M is about the same performance level as the desktop GTX 770, though obviously with some newer features like DX12 support and VXGI. It's also twice as fast as the GTX 860M and 35% faster than GTX 880M on average.

One of the problems we're starting to run into with mobile GPUs getting so fast is that many laptops still top out at a 1920x1080 display, and even at maximum detail there are plenty of games that will easily break 60 FPS and may start running into CPU bottlenecks. For that reason, NVIDIA is billing the GTX 980M as a mobile GPU that targets playable frame rates at resolutions beyond 1080p, and we'll likely see more high-end notebooks ship with 2560x1440, 3K, or even 4K displays. It's probably a bit too much to assume that 3K gaming at 60 FPS will happen on most titles at maximum quality with the 980M, as games like Metro: Last Light and Crysis 3 can be very taxing, but we're definitely getting close to being able to max out settings on most games.

NVIDIA didn't provide specific numbers for their previous generation mobile GPUs, but they do note that GTX 980M should be around 40% faster than the GTX 880M, which is no mean feat. Compared to the first generation Kepler GPU, GTX 680M, the difference is even larger: 980M is roughly twice as fast as the GTX 680M that launched three years ago. GTX 970M is also supposed to be about 40% faster than the previous generation GTX 870M and on average twice as fast as the GTX 860M.

Wrapping up, we've provided a full gallery of slides from the NVIDIA presentation for those that are interested. We're very much looking forward to some hands on time testing out the GTX 980M, as it should prove to be quite a formidable GPU. That's not too surprising as GM204 proved to be quite potent on desktop GPUs, with a smaller and more efficient chip able to basically match and generally exceed the performance of l the larger and more power hungry GTX 780 Ti. The result is that this is as close as notebooks have come to matching desktop performance (for a single GPU) in as long as I've been reviewing notebooks.

Looking forward, performance is always improving and we'll certainly see even faster GPUs in the next year. We also know that NVIDIA is capable of making larger GPUs, so we're still missing the true "Big Maxwell" (i.e. GM200 or GM210). As with the GF110 and GK110 I don't expect we'll ever see that chip in consumer notebooks, but we might see GM204 return with even more SMMs enabled. But until NVIDIA comes out with an even bigger and faster Maxwell variant, this is the top mobile GPU, and that means it will priced as such.

We should see GTX 980M in gaming notebooks starting around the $2000 price point (give or take), with GTX 970M launching in notebooks starting at $1600. Based on MSI's pricing of their GT72, it also looks like the GTX 980M may have as much as a $350 price premium over the GTX 970M, or at least that's the difference in pricing for end users. (Ouch.) We're covering the notebooks that have been announced in separate Pipeline articles, and we should see some of them at the usual places like Newegg and Amazon. Stay tuned for our performance results from the MSI GT72, which will go up as soon as we get the laptop and can run some tests.