As if today's raft of AMD announcements weren't enough, the NDA has also lifted on Nvidia's new range of mobile GPUs - the 8800GTS and range-topping GTX. They should bring some belated speediness to DirectX 10 laptop graphics.
The launch follows up the advent of the first 8-series GeForce mobile chips back in the summer.
At the May launch event for the 8600M and 8400M series, Rene Haas, Nvidia's general manager of notebook graphics, said the current growth of notebook sales represented "the perfect storm" for Nividia's mobile graphics plans.
And no wonder. With ATI's laptop graphics division looking in a poor state of health (pending launches next year) yet laptop sales soaring, Nvidia clearly realises the opportunity is clear and present.
More stream processors
We got the lowdown on the Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX and GeForce 8800M GTS at an Nvdia event earlier this month where it rapidly became clear these are the mobile chips we've been waiting for.
The previous range topper was the 625MHz 8700M GT, essentially a clocked up version of the 475MHz 8600M GT (with increased shader and memory clocks to boot). But one area it didn't improve upon was the number of stream processors in order to keep the thermals down - that remained at 32. And when the desktop GeForce 8800GTX has 128, it doesn't take a genius to see where performance is limited.
The new chips have stream processor numbers of 64 for the GTS and 96 for the GTX, meaning they should benchmark far better. Both have a core clock of 500MHz, shader clock of 1250MHz and memory clocked at 1600MHz. They're aimed squarely at enthusiasts.
As you'd expect, the new chips also boast Nvidia's PureVideo HD engine supporting playback of HD content.
