Nvidia Unveils 'World's Fastest Notebook GPU'

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based graphics chip maker said in a blog post that the new GPU “is DirectX 11 done right” thanks to a dedicated Tessellation engine built into GeForce GTX 480M chips that boosts the GPU’s performance to five times that of other mobile graphics chips on the market, according to Nvidia.

The Fermi architecture and Nvidia’s transition to 40-nanometer process technology mean more CUDA-enabled cores than previous-generation mobile GPUs from the company -- the GeForce GTX 480M has a whopping 352 cores in all and delivers 897 CUDA gigaflops of performance, according to Nvidia.

The new GPU has a 425MHz graphics clock, 850MHz processor clock and the memory clock spins at 1.2GHz with GDDR5 memory bandwidth of 76.8GB per second.

The new GPU is also loaded with some of Nvidia’s latest technologies, including 3D Vision, 3DTV Play and PhsyX, The chip supports CUDA, OpenCL, DirectCompute, OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL 3.2. Blu-ray decode and PureVideo HD 1080p Full HD playback are also built into the GTX 480M, as are standard GeForce features like SLI support for pairing video cards and PCI Express 2.0 support.

The first notebooks to include the new GPU will be released in mid-June by Clevo, with more OEMs on board to ship GTX 480M systems soon after, according to Nvidia.

The GTX 480M now stands at the top of the stack of Nvidia’s current generation of mobile graphics processors for consumer notebooks. Just below are the GeForce GTS 360M, GTS 350M, GTX 260M and GTX 285M for enthusiast users, next in line are the GeForce GT 325M, GT 330M, and GT 335M aimed at performance users, and the GeForce 305M and 310M geared towards mainstream users.