nVidia 2015 mobile speculation thread

There is a difference. I had no faith in skylake and wound up being correct. As for Maxwell, eh. It is better than the **** 880m (i know, before you say it), and is decent. I got the zm because my old laptop sucked and my hm by Clevo was dead (mb). Meanwhile, I still have no faith in Intel (not because competition, but because with the die shrinks, they don't seem to be honing the architecture. Meaning they aren't refining what is and isn't working as I'd like. Also, it seems the die shrink has hit a wall on yields, opening up the field a bit. Amd has to play catch up, but knows a lot about the elements of their architecture. I have going hopes Zen gets them in the game (I didn't say beat).). But with video cards, the die shrink will be huge on performance. If you get a Maxwell now, you will either want to upgrade next year or the year after (if they jump straight down to 10nm, the next likely node to stay on for years).

 

JinKizuite, SLI is the way forward for now, you are right that 1 980m won't be enough - 2 SLI'd works great and still has some headroom for the games yet to release between now and Pascal.

It's sad that at the same time so many people are coming off of bad SLI experiences so they are saying SLI is dead, but instead it's actually making a come back with so many OEM's releasing SLI laptops.

 

Moore's Law is dead and die shrinks are becoming like chassis shrinks... stupid. If you try to stuff 10 pounds of sand into a 5 pound sand bag, something is going to break. Awesomeness requires some bulk. More performance per watt is a pipe dream and rhetoric when limitations and strings are attached and it craters from heat because there is no good way to cool it at high clock speeds. But, talking heads keep reciting the same mantra because they are not paying attention or lack understanding. Being excited about more performance per watt only makes sense when you keep the same watts or increase watts and thereby raise the ceiling on performance to unprecedented levels. In other words, awesome means doing more with more, with more, not more with less. Doing more with less is a cop out. Otherwise, it makes as little good sense as being excited about a 4 cylinder engine having more horsepower per cubic inch even though it lacks cubic inches so that when everything is said and done the monster V8 stroker motor still rips it's little heiney off and throws it into the corner to rot.

 

Have you seen the yields approximated on ibm, Samsung, glofo 7nm process? 20B transistors in the size of a fingernail for cpu (been done on gpu, but is impressive considering current 14nm yields by Intel)! Now, I do agree it is a matter of what you said, but the difference in yields from 22 to 14nm on Intel wasn't much because 14nm finFET from them is the area of 22nm planer. 7nm truly is the shrink that finally hits a theoretical jump. But Intel is pushing it possibly to 2020! (2017 is 10nm, all further plans are indefinite at the moment, but they mentioned it seems to be headed to 2.5 years per node, suggesting 2020). But this is also very expensive to design on, uses silicon-germanium transistors with EUV lithography. As 10nm can be done without more expensive materials and a new lithography that may cause significant design r&d, I say this is where the graphics companies will stop (unless something happens to allow tsmc to use the old lithography or something). But, 7nm at all but Intel could keep Moore's law alive.

 

I said over 23 as in min. Average is higher, fps bounce between 30 and 70ish I believe. I use vsync to keep it at 30 for less fan noise. 24 fps is in the new lions arch with like 30 ppl stacked at bank and lots at mystic forge, others running around, etc.. and getting all of them on screen. That said it's still impressive considering its maxed out on everything including supersample and running on my 1920x1200 screen.

 

Mr. Fox, actually the die shrinks have smaller sand...you get more sand per pound, not more pounds per sack.

And, each sand granule put's out slightly less heat, but in total it put's out more heat because they do pack more granules into the same size sack.

It's the sack size shrinkage that does them in. The denser the loading in the sack, the less square surface area open to air cooling, the hotter per square measure of sack it gets.

They are now talking about 3D stacking, layering, going vertical to get more density, which will reduce the surface area free for air cooling at a faster rate, causing heat to get trapped between layers as well.

A liquid-cooling matrix latticed through the CPU-Cube could be the answer. You can't install little tiny fans on the edges of the cube, but you can run cooling pipes through it.

The cooling is what isn't keeping pace with the heat generation problems.

Same for teeny tiny skinny laptops, inadequate cooling is killing performance.

We either need to build big again, like you said, or change the game and revolutionize cooling.

How about a heat to power converter? Draw the power out of the battery at one end, and convert the heat to power and push the power back in the other end of the battery.

Regenerative baking for laptops

 

Not sure how to join in on this discussion...

 

@hmscott - yup, you're exactly right. If they keep being obsessed with smaller they are going to have to do things different. What used to work will not work. It's unfortunate that they are so preoccupied with smaller. Smaller is nice for smartphones and tablets. For real computers, it's just stupid and unnecessary. Things would be easier and far more powerful keeping a larger die and just packing more and more into that larger space using that "more sand per pound" approach (nice analogy). That's what I mean by doing more with more, with more, not more with less. The latter approach seldom works well in any scenario. It sucks in business and with technology.

Edit: A Special Message to Intel and OEMs:
Hey morons! Go back to 22nm mobile socketed fully unlocked/unlimited TDP CPUs, ditch the retarded SoC approach with on-die memory controller and give us a mobile extreme 8-core/16 thread 150W-200W laptop CPU and stop acting like a bunch of sissies. OEMs... grow a pair and give us some 650W AC adapters to handle the performance demands and just stop the stand-up comedy act with the pathetic little panty-waist power bricks. Then we can overclock the crap out of our monster CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs without any power-crippled nonsense getting in our way.

 

Anyone considered cutting your own chassis and making a sort of DIY DTR with mini-ITX components?

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/itx-laptop/?page=2

 

Why not closer to a tough book design?

Edit: looks like a metal suitcase.

 

I can agree with all that. And by the way I also prefer larger thicker notebooks that can actually do a proper job of it as opposed to thinner lighter machines that don't. Unfortunately this seems to be a minority opinion which I believe is why ASUS went this route which is, as you say, a compromise.

 

What's GW2? Is it a demanding game cause I sure would want to try it just to see the performance.

Get a 980M right now cause it's a great choice but if you want to future proof your machine, I would suggest you to go with SLi. Star citizen is a great game. I have the hangar module installed and it stays at a constant 60fps but dips to 45fps when in dogfights. The maxwell GPUs don't exactly fully support DX 12 so you might want to hold back for one more year and get the 1000M (just my 2 cents).

Your 970m is extremely close to a gtx 880m though provided the gtx 880m is in full working condition (lol) which is only 3% of what was ever produced. Fortunately for me, dell tweaked the 880ms they had in stock which is why I haven't upgraded so far.

Is it the same game (GW2)? You should try crysis 3 at max preset, should be a more demanding.

 

I wonder how true that is or if Dell were blowing smoke up your.. ahem. Weren't they throttling like the others in that other thread or did I misunderstand something?

 

They throttle... I gave up arguing about it.

 

GW2 = Guild Wars 2
I dont think its too demanding since the 970m still can handle it.
I just mention it because its the most demanding game I play. Im not looking for more demanding games lol.

 

I thought so. I thought I was living in the twilight zone for a second. @PC GAMER is the one blowing smoke then

 

No, it does actually work. Many people can confirm that. They did tweak it a little so that it works close to how it should have been. It still throttles but that is to prevent excessive temps. It's still is a hit or miss though, let's just agree some works ( very little close to insignificant) and others are horrible failures. Don't you all think I was gonna upgrade or at least ask for a refund since a while back If the performance wasn't great? Also, I am not giving false information or saying that the 880m is good in any way, I am just saying that is it an underrated GPU especially when it works and yes there are some cards that perform as they should. I am one of the few that didn't go on the 980M hype train due to the performance not being appealing to me. @Ethrem , it's true that for an 880m to get a good score that can compete with your 980m, a custom VBIOS should be used while your 980M works flawlessly with the stock one. Again, it's all a matter of opinions, the 880M ,for some, may be the anti-Christ but it satisfies my need which is all that matters. I've watched countless comparison between the 880M and 970M, the difference is literally 5-10fps only so yeah they are close GPUs provided they are stock to stock.

It's kind of foolish for me to do that given that the tech world moves fast and old techs are close to obsolete but I guess I just want to put it out there that while bad, some 880ms perform close to how they should.

 

@PC GAMER Well I won't derail the thread further, at the end of the day as long as you're happy with how they perform it doesn't really matter.

 

How's your 980Ti? I am thinking of getting one (won't be travelling for at least a year now ) but the price is way off the charts, close to 800USD on eBay and way more expensive at local retailers. Any ideas?

 

You should try GW2 on your Asus and see what happens :/

 

He has a Clevo lol... And a Batman

 

We had a talk about my old asus ul30vt with 1.3GHz ULV.
Needless to say it wouldn't end well

 

I love the performance. I got mine from NCIX Canada. Their prices and shipping are reasonable for international buyers.

 

Well, that was an interesting read. At first I felt sorry for myself because I spent the entire week tearing apart my loop, rebuilding it with a defective RIVBE board, then staying up till 4am tearing down the new loop, and rebuilding the old one, all the while trying to tune this new 4930K I got. But now after reading the least 30 pages I realized at least I did something semi-productive.

Oh and for the record, if you're going to spend 4000 Euros on a laptop with an external watercooling solution, you might as well build a real watercooled desktop yourself. The desktop in my sig, even including all the watercooling parts probably comes out to around $5000 USD now. X79 boards and used Ivy-E CPUs have gotten so cheap it's an incredible steal as long as you don't mind some of the platform limitations.

 

980 Ti is perfect for 2560x1440 @ 100+ FPS in most games. It's a good investment IMHO unless you want to wait 6-9 months for Pascal. But even with Pascal on the horizon I'm thinking the 980 Ti should suffice for the next couple of years easily considering it easily crunches any game with ease right now and most at 120+ FPS at 1440p.

 

Wow, that's an expensive expensive desktop, kind of surprised considering you've 'only' got x2 970's in there (albeit at a stonking 1600Mhz!) - I would have thought you could have got more performance for the money you spent by deleting the parts that contributed mostly to the $5000 and instead replacing those with say x2 980ti's. Or are have you got a fantastic monitor (or multi monitor) that you included in that $5000?

 

Yes the $5000 includes everything, meaning monitor, peripherals, and all the watercooling gear (which itself is probably worth $1000+ alone). So take away monitor ($800) and watercooling stuff, and the desktop is basically around $3000. I know it's only 2x970's but still cost more than a 980 Ti even with the 10% discount I got when buying lol.

 

The 980Ti is one beast of a card

 

Ah right, it includes the monitor & everything else - that's better! I still think I would have upgraded the GPUs to say sli 980ti and got rid of the water cooling (even though water cooling is definitely cool in more ways than one!). Although, is sli 980ti overkill for a 144Hz 1440p monitor? If it is overkill, then I would have either gone multi-monitor with sli 980ti (but that probably costs more than your $5000 you spent!) or saved the cash. I'm looking forward to building my first desktop when my laptop becomes obsolete.

 

Definitely not overkill. I can barely get 30-40FPS in GTA V maxed out with 4xAA at 1440p with a GTX 980Ti running at ~1400Mhz.

 

^drop the AA man, can you even tell the difference while playing the game? I don't have sensitive eyes so if AA tanks my frame I just turn it off.

The only way I'll do multi-GPU setups again in a desktop is if someone paid for the second card lol. Seriously nVidia screwed up the frame pacing with Maxwell, and I swear my 780M SLI Clevo feels smoother than my desktop. Even worse whenever FPS drops below 50 in any game, the micro stutter instantly kicks in and really ruins the experience. Not to mention when a game doesn't support SLI or has horrible implementation, the second card is basically dead weight (quite literally too). Plus with UE4 not supporting SLI at all, SLI is becoming a really hard sell for me. Another major problem (which is commonly overlooked) is that with 2 GPUs, you basically can't add any more expansion cards into your motherboard, even if they're watercooled and only take up a single slot. Unless you can get a single slot PCIe bracket that is.

As for watercooling, that's definitely here to stay. For one it's somewhat of a necessity since I push my hardware right to the limits, and air cooling just won't cut it. And two watercooling has the great advantage that I have complete control over where I want to dump the heat, and the way I have mine set up, all the heat goes out of the case, so none of the internals get cooked. Finally it looks awesome.

Not into multi-monitor at this point, mainly because the amount of time I spend gaming doesn't justify the cost. It's just too bad that AMD really disappointed with the Fury X, since I really don't feel like giving nVidia any more money after they lied about the 970. But unless I wait for 16nm GPUs I may not have a choice.

 

Right there with ya pal. Water-cooling is definitely not a common thing thus explaining the higher price tag. Mineral oil provides better cooling results though but is definitely a lot riskier and a lot more expensive. Anyways, it's either mineral oil or water-cooling. Most likely won't do those insane builds right off the bat though.

@n=1 , UE4 supports sli as long as you have windows 10 and DX 12.

 

UE4 supports SLI w/ DX12? Can I see a source for that? In any case I won't be upgrading to Win 10 for a good while, unless DX12 proves to live up to all its hype, and even then I may just "consider" upgrading. But by the looks of it, I'll be rocking Win 7 till 2020.

 

No offense but your laptop is already obsolete

Sent from my LG-H811 using Tapatalk

 

Haha, not for me, I'm happy with the fps it's pushing out with the games I play & the latest games - essentially has the same performance as an 880M when taking my 900p screen into account vs the standard 1080p screen. Good enough for me for now! Haha

 

So it has the same fps an 880M gets but in 900p. Well, I don't really know how to put it but I think your laptop is pretty obsolete :/ anyways, if you are satisfied with its performance and if you can play new games then by all means go ahead

 

Sure thing, people can obviously describe it any way they want - most people on average wouldn't say it's obsolete, but I get why some people would think it is - and yeah I'm fine with it, it fits my needs for now, no point in upgrading before I want or need to.

 

Fair enough... I can't tolerate anything below 1080p so yeah, 900p won't work for me but if it works for you fair enough!

Sent from my LG-H811 using Tapatalk

 

What about my Clevo M570U with T7200, 3GB system RAM and FX2500M? Am I good for the Vive/Rift?

 

You'll most likely be able to play Mad max and MGSV at 1080p with decent fps. Best ports of the year along with GTA 5 and witcher 3. Do you play at ultra with anti-aliasing on as well?

 

Just got into the PC world and these components don't make no sense to me :/ Well with 3 gb of ram, it's a 32-bit system not quite considering most games demand 64-bit if am not mistaken. It's overkill for anything valve related though actually even a potato can max out any valve games impressive how the source engine works and looks okay too.

 

Thanks for the tips about Mad Max and MGSV - I don't have those yet. Most of the games I play are at Ultra settings for the most part, here's a screenshot of my settings for the latest game I have, Arkham Knight:

It plays well on those settings, no stuttering, between 30-60fps for the most part with some occasional drops to the high 20's. Would ideally like an extra 10% performance in that game to stay above 30fps at ALL times, but it's quite rare it dips to the high 20's. This has been the most demanding game to date on my hardware I reckon. I've disabled the AA in that one for a couple of extra frames - plus as a bonus removes the blurriness of SMAA, the jaggies don't seem too prevalent to me.

The internal benchmark of Arkham Knight is not that representative of in-game experience, but on the benchmark I get 47fps avg, 36fps min.

 

That's great, definitely much better than me. SLi downright sucks, AA and game works take a good chunk of your fps and the stuttering, my god the stuttering actually made me want to throw up. Batman arkham knight throw up simulator 2015. Still have to check the latest patch.

 

My benchmark results are from the latest patch of Arkham Knight, mind you I didn't get stuttering before the patch either, but fps has increased by more than 10% since the patch - prior to the patch I was at 42fps avg (32min) with lower shadows on Low rather than Normal.

 

Sounds rather expensive n=1.

There is a tendency to assume desktop components are always cheaper than gaming laptops; however, I suppose it adds up when you factor in all the peripherals, monitor, shipping for all the components, etc.

With the ebb and flow of laptop vs desktop component product release cycles and discounts on older stock, sometimes the pricing for mid range gaming laptop compares favorably with a desktop.

When the 970M launched, Clevo came out with P650SE priced around $1200 - at the time, a lot of people with lower end gaming desktops were using GTX 760 or 770, for example.

 

Wow, the patch really worked dude, I got a whooping 29fps on average with 45fps max. Only one 880M was active (no SLi profile as of yet), use the other 880M for physX only. They didn't quite optimize gaming laptops yet .
Everything maxed out with gameworks on and vsync off

 

Only a 29fps average in the benchmark, sounds like you've got ALL of the NVidia Gamesworks features enabled. Disable the Interactive Fog and disable the Interactive Paper Debris too - they're both the worst offenders when it comes to an fps hit. The Enhanced Rain & Lightshafts you remain enabled - they only have a very small fps hit.

EDIT: I reran the benchmark at maxed out settings to compare against your 880M sli results - I got 26fps average (max 42) which is not far away from yours and that was with VRAM being overcommitted by 1GB (needs 4GB card to max it) - that extra 880M is not doing much for you in that game. Definitely turn off those 2 NVidia GamesWorks settings I mentioned.

EDIT#2: Running benchmark absolutely maxed out except for disabling Fog & Paper results in average 41, minimum 31, maximum 60. So for sure disable the Fog & Paper @PC GAMER ! And apologies to all for the extended off-topic chat!

 

Just reran the benchmark, got 43fps. My other 880M is doing absolutely ********, just chilling. The textures need a lot more work put into them, absolutely atrocious. Other than that, I disabled Interactive smoke & debris, the rest was maxed out, 16X anisotropic filtering. The game needs a lot more optimization as it's absolutely **** as of now. The patch literally solved nothing for me, actually made everything worse and to thing I wasted 90USD on this piece of ****.

 

Must be variable from system to system, post patch the performance is better for me and textures are good, I have no issues with the game, runs fine for me - strange that it's so system specific. Anyway, last post from me on topic of Arkham Knight, I can only allow myself so much off-topic!