Nvidia GeForce 9M Series: Laptops get graphics boost

By Dan Ackerman on 04 June 2008, 10:00am

Laptop gamers usually have a pretty serious case of desktop envy when it comes to their graphics cards, especially since even mid-price desktops can sport water-cooled SLI dual-card setups these days.

It's actually gotten better lately, as laptop gamers have had access to Nvidia's GeForce 8800 technology -- putting them in the same general area as the desktop cards. But when desktop PCs got the latest GeForce 9800 cards a few months ago, we were again feeling a little left out.

Today at Computex, the computer trade show in Taiwan, Nvidia unveiled a new lineup of laptop GPUs, called the GeForce 9M Series. The new chips run from the GeForce 9100M through 9600M GT -- sorry, no 9800 yet -- and offer many of the same benefits found on Nvidia's latest desktop offerings, including Hybrid SLI, which allows a discrete GPU and an integrated GPU to work together.

The new GPUs fall into three main categories: for performance, the GeForce 9600M GT, 9600M GS and 9500M G are available; the mainstream category includes GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9300M GS, and GeForce 9200M GS; and the GeForce 9100M G falls into the value category.

Also worth noting: these cards aren't officially spec'd for DirectX 10.1. Nvidia says, "DirectX 10.1 is a collection of incremental feature additions beyond DirectX 10, some of which GeForce 8/9/200 Series GPUs already support, but not all."

The technology will be available in laptops starting this summer. -Dan Ackerman