Nvidia directX 11 Mobile Gpu's

Anyone know or have an idea with regards to when Nvidia will release directX 11 mobile gpu's? If so, and also, does anyone have any specs info?

I assume they will release them soon, since they have finally released their desktop gpu's (GTX 480 & 470). However, that is just an assumption.

 

There have been some rumors about them coming out in the next 3 months or so, but I hold little hope for them given the problems that Nvidia has had just getting the desktop chips out. If anything, they'll run very hot and relatively slow compared to what ATI is offering.

 

Due to the severe limitations of a laptop, power and heat are the two biggest enemies for high-end mobile GPUs and unfortunately, as Pitabred mentioned, desktop Fermi cards are notoriously hot and power hungry. The fundamental Fermi architecture is very powerful, which may explain the heat and power draw and as the hardware matures within the desktop world the performance gain will certainly improve.

But in terms of mobile GPUs, it seems that the GPU either has to be nerfed more so than usual or it may take longer than usual for nvidia to develop a cooler, less power hungry mobile chip or a combo of the two.

Nvidia does have their mainstream Fermi reported to be releasing in Q2 2010 (or early Q3 2010), GTS 4xx cards. And so the GTX 4xxM cards if they do come out will likely be equivalent to a mid-range or a bit lower-end desktop mainstream card. Basically I expect performance to be slightly higher than last gen except it will have DX11 support, similar to ATI's Mobility HD5000 cards.

 

My guess, G200 rebadge.

The GTX280/GTX285 were all G95 rebadges. G200 is still slightly smaller than the FERMI.

 

Given how ATI has the already efficient 5770 to just reclock and relabel into a mobile part, I'm thinking your expectations might be a little high. Given how many rebadges Nvidia has done since the 9800 series (their current generation of mobile GPUs are still essentially the same, no new architecture), and how late and hot the Fermi is especially compared to the ATI DX11 cards, their mobile chip prospects don't look good at all. I can imagine they may come out with mobile DX11 cards, but I highly doubt that they'll be anywhere near the watt/performance ratio that ATI currently has, if even able to keep up with the 5870s.

 

This would be the next logical step and a very possible one at that since NVIDIA ceased their desktop GTX 2xx production a while before Fermi was even released. And so one can speculate that batches of G200 cores are reserved for their next gen mobile GPU.

But the only issue is that it will still be a DX10 card while ATI is already churning out DX11 mobile GPUs and so ATI can play up the marketing really well with DX11 and I'm not sure if this would be a wise business decision for nvidia.

I think one one end you have people expecting G200 rebadges to come late this year for nvidia's next gen high end mobile GPU and on the other end you have some people (I wont name names) who expect a high-end mobile Fermi within the next 3 months.

 

Nvidia has made it clear they don't think DX11 is important. For a while, my impression was FERMI wasn't going to be DX11 and that their CUDA was going to save them. It wasn't until later it became clear and I think under pressure they had to make it DX11 compatible.
- If you notice, FERMI does not have hardware specific for DX11 like Tessellation. They were able to force it down through their shader cores is what they did. They did it well, but it's not like ATI with dedicated Tessellation core.

I mean they did it before, they forced MS to change DX10 to nothing, maybe they thought they could do it again.

The Mobile HD5870 has a dedicated tessellation core which is why it can play DX11 much better than people expected. You can read G73 thread where speculators always ranting HD5870 won't be able to play DX11, when HD5870 Mobility has been crunching through DX11 without any problems.

If Nvidia was to use FERMI, they would have to reduce shader cores from the 400+ to something like 100+. Now the reason why HD5870 can perform so well is because Tessellation is separate from all the other operations that happen on the shader cores. With FERMI mobile it will have to crunch Tessellation along with the other shader processes on maybe 150 or less cores.

I would not be surprised if Nvidia flatly says DX11 is not important for Mobile platform. I wouldn't be surprised by anything they say, whatever makes them the most profit.

 

Indeed, ATI has done very well in terms of keeping the watt and heat down even in their desktop HD5870, which was a vast improvement over the HD4870 while still delivery stellar performance gains. But yea the Mobility HD5870 is about equal to a desktop HD5770 and seeing how cool the HD5000 cores are it's no surprise that the Mobility HD5870 can still perform well even with a big power and heat restriction as imposed by the laptop structure.

I'm with you in that I doubt mobile Fermi will be released very soon, maybe late this year but then again I don't think they will rebadge the G200 and sell it as the GTX 4xxM cards. But who knows. And as for high-end mobile Fermi, it will certainly be interesting to see how it performs as the severe heat and power restriction in a laptop will certainly nerf the performance and as Fermi is a brand new architecture it's not that surprising to see the immature hardware coming out first with lots of heat and power with relatively low performance gains. The GTX 5xx and 6xx cards should definitely be raising the power/heat to performance ratio, as the ATI have done with their HD5000 cards with I believe still uses the same basic architecture from their HD3000 days and has had alot of maturation time to pull off big performance and big efficiency.

 

Not about equal. The 5800 series is the exact same chip as the desktop 5770 with just various clocking and memory interfaces changed around depending on the grade.

 

i agree.. its going to be a G200 rebagge.. which NVDIA was famous for doing with G92... Ferni is just too hot and will have to be cut down a lot to be used in notebooks.