1) They love getting timely drivers (especially gamers)

2) They want their drivers on the same schedule and feature set as their desktop counterparts

Last week NVIDIA launched its WHQLed Release 185 drivers for desktop AND notebook PCs with NVIDIA GPUs. While the first notebook driver release was all about CUDA and PhysX on a notebook, we are just as excited about this release because it provides notebook customers with the exact same features and performance optimizations as desktop customers just as we were asked to. PC gamers will be thrilled to hear that this driver offers all of the latest game optimizations and performance for both single GPU and SLI notebook PCs.

This driver also supports Windows 7. Many of you probably know that Microsoft just posted the release candidate version of Windows 7. That build together with NVIDIA’s R185 drivers provides a rock solid, fully featured Windows experience. I’ve been using this combination both at work and at home and I am really enjoying the speed and responsiveness that Windows 7 and NVIDIA GPUs offer, not to mention the increased battery life.

Windows 7 significantly increases the use of the GPU over Windows Vista by utilizing the GPU to accelerate 2D as well as 3D. GDI hardware acceleration, Direct2D, and DirectWrite are all new to Windows 7 and will bring more speed and more visually compelling applications to customers. Also new in Windows 7 is GPU accelerated H.264 and DIVX codecs in the box for high quality playback performance. This combined will battery life improvements will allow you more playback time for high definition movies.

But perhaps the most compelling new feature for GPU in Windows 7 is DirectX Compute. This new API from Microsoft allows developers of many types to harness the GPU for computing workloads in multimedia, scientific computing, and gaming. This allows for an entirely new level of performance on systems that ship with GPU’s. DirectX Compute runs great on the NVIDIA CUDA architecture, and NVIDIA has already demoed DirectX Compute on several occasions. DirectX Compute is the foundation that both NVIDIA and Microsoft will use to bring new consumer lifestyle applications to market at the time of launch. All in all, we are really excited about the possibilities that Windows 7 and Microsoft are bringing to the table and how the GPU is being used.

This driver also delivers improved performance in GPU computing applications by including version 2.2 of the CUDA toolkit and SDK. We have a great roster of applications that run on the NVIDIA CUDA architecture that consumers will love. Just ask Xavier about vReveal. You can download trial versions of these applications and many more cool NVIDIA PhysX gaming applications here (all for FREE!).

Like typical driver updates, this driver is an instant upgrade to your GPU performance. Examples of this performance jumps include:

o Up to 25% performance increase in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

o Up to 22% performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with antialiasing enabled

o Up to 11% performance increase in Fallout 3 with antialiasing enabled

o Up to 14% performance increase in Far Cry 2

o Up to 45% performance increase in Mirror’s Edge with antialiasing enabled

(Release 185 drivers vs. Release 179 drivers -results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings)

I encourage notebook users to upgrade to these new Release 185 drivers and you can find them here.

New Driver Improves Your Gaming Performance 11 to 45%!! is a post by Rene Haas from Notebooks.com.

The new flagship GeForce GTX 280M is the fastest Notebook GPU in the world and when coupled with SLI the fastest multi-GPU notebook solution. Playing the latest demanding 3D games with desktop-caliber settings on a notebook is finally a reality.

The new line-up of notebook GPUs from NVIDIA include:

• GeForce GTX 280M and 260M enthusiast notebook GPUs. The GeForce GTX 280M is the world’s fastest notebook GPU

• GeForce GTS 160M and 150M, perfect GPUs for high-performance, sleek notebooks.

These new GPUs are designed to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption. By leveraging an advanced 55nm-process with the G92 GPU architecture we’re able to deliver up to 50% higher performance and increase the perf/mm^2 by 80%, all within the same power budget, compared to the previous generation. With this level of efficiency, these new enthusiast GPUs are perfectly suited for the notebook market and deliver up to 30% more performance than our competition.

One note about product names – We made the decision to name this product series the GeForce GTX 280M and GTX 260M as it lines up with our company-wide product naming format (GTX x60-x95 is enthusiast, GTS x40-x60 is high-performance, etc), making it easier for end users to determine which GPU is best for them. We understand the die-hards (and admittedly our best customers) might want our naming format to reflect the underlying architecture. To the technical minded reader, we readily acknowledge the underlying GPU architecture, and are thrilled to bring you these new super-breed 55nm GPUs which drive so much more performance than our previous generation…up to 50% more.

In addition to raw graphics performance, these GPUs also offer NVIDIA PhysX technology that enables a totally new class of physical gaming interaction in upcoming games and existing ones like EA’s Mirror’s Edge. NVIDIA CUDA technology is also built in, so users can accelerate demand tasks such as video transcoding up to 10 times. These GPUs also are included in the new notebook driver downloads from nvidia.com, which I’ve blogged about in the past so you’re always up-to-date with the latest apps and games.

These products also complete the launch of our entire new set of notebook GeForce GPUs, which we believe offer great value to end users. The GTX” series is for enthusiast gamers who desire gaming performance above anything else. The GTS” series is ideal for high-performance gamers who also want a sleek notebook. The GT” is our performance GPU product line and offers a great mix of GPU capability and mobility. And the G” is for mainstream users who desire maximum mobility.

Finally, along with the announcement of these new notebook GPUs we’ve launched a new microsite on nvidia.com that talks more about the advantages of gaming on a notebook and some of the unique features offered by these GPUs, as well as information about our partner’s systems which include them. We urge you to check it out and see which of these new GPUs is right for you.

As end users are gravitating more toward mobile form factors we’re investing resources to deliver more compelling solutions in this space. You can see that with the new ION product for ultra portability and affordability, Tegra for smartphones, and these new enthusiast GeForce notebook GPUs today. NVIDIA solutions for mobile devices are available for all types of users.

Rene Haas is General Manager of Notebooks at NVIDIA

NVIDIA Delivers the Fastest Notebook GPU Ever – and More is a post by Rene Haas from Notebooks.com.

For consumers, that meant that new notebooks which used GPUs typically took longer to come to market.

So NVIDIA took the lead in working with our notebook partners to define a standard module that could be designed once, and leveraged across many notebooks. We called this module specification MXM. Think of this as an add-in-card for notebooks. After doing all the technical homework, we released MXM as a standard to the computing industry. MXM was quickly adopted by OEMs and GPU makers alike, and it opened up the selection of a GPU to the most competitive GPU, which means consumers get better products. For our notebook partners, that was also good because then they could design one notebook to support a wide variety of different MXM GPUs.

In today’s challenging economy, reducing unnecessary work and bringing out new products faster makes everyone happy both our partners and end consumers. In the case of MXM, using the interface can mean getting notebooks to market 3-6 months sooner than designing a new motherboard.

Today, you’ll find that nearly every high-performance notebook uses some form of an MXM card. In fact, not only is this the case for high-end gaming systems, but there are also many vendors who ship MXM in less expensive systems simply due to the design and manufacturing flexibility it gives them in their supply chain.

Of course, end users have always wanted user upgradable graphics, but MXM is not intended to be an enabler for end user upgradable graphics. The fact is that defining a module specification like MXM isn’t the only thing that’s necessary to deliver upgradable graphics. The chassis, the thermal solution, and many other factors are at play.

Notebooks are the obvious home for MXM, but as it turns out, the technology is not limited to this one market. Not only does MXM help make new GPUs available in notebooks faster, but it also makes it easier to get a GPU into anything that’s small and difficult to cool.

Today’s desktop designs are becoming increasingly focused on sleek industrial design. Many OEMs are now offering all-in-one systems (with integrated displays like the iMac), or tiny Atom-based desktops where there’s not a lot of space to cool a GPU, or even fit one in the chassis. These systems are facing many of the same problems that notebooks have faced for years. For these desktop designs, MXM offers a nice, compact existing solution that’s already an industry standard in notebooks.

You can find MXM modules in lots of all-in-one and small-form-factor desktop systems like the HP TouchSmart PCs, Apples iMacs, or Sony VAIO desktops, for example. You’ll also find many of the most cutting edge desktops that are packing high-performance GPUs into cool, quiet chassis. For example, the HP Firebird system has two MXM cards running in SLI an impressive amount of computing horsepower in a compact beautiful chassis.

Going a bit farther outside the normal consumer PC space, we’ve even found that there’s great interest for using MXM cards in embedded systems for industrial or military applications, as well as for high-end servers with GPU farms that need to pack more computational density into small racks

Going forward, we’ll continue to invest in making MXM a better solution. The MXM 3.0 specification adds new features like Display Port, shaves about 1mm from the thickness, and creates upward mechanical compatibility between small and large MXM form factors. With MXM 3.0, we are also happy to welcome AMD as an official partner of MXM. Their input has been instrumental in making MXM an open and forward-looking specification for everyone in the PC ecosystem.

Rene Haas is General Manager of Notebooks at NVIDIA

MXM Brings Flexibility to Notebook Graphics is a post by Rene Haas from Notebooks.com.

One smartphone element that needs some more discussion is the value of battery life figures that one finds at the point of purchase or research. Whether it’s the iPhone, Blackberry Bold, Blackberry Storm, or Nokia N6, there initially appears to be variability between claims, tests, and personal usage. Let’s take a look at each phone and see if that’s the case.

iPhone

Apple’s web site lists the following for the 3G iPhone:

• Talk time: up to 5 hours on 3G, 10 hours on 2G

• Standby time: up to 300 hours

• Internet use: up to 5 hours on 3G, 6 hours on WiFi

• Video playback: Up to 7 hours

• Audio playback: Up to 24 hours

The birdseed print states that the testing was done with pre-production handsets back in June, 2008. I also found the methodology interesting in that different features were sometimes toggled on/off during the tests: WiFi association, WiFi ask to join networks”, call forwarding, and auto-brightness.

Anandtech did their own testing and reported the following battery life for the 3G iPhone:

• Talk time: 4 hours 44 mins (284 mins) on 3G; 6 hours 4 mins (364 mins) on EDGE

• Web browsing: 3 hours 17 mins (197 minutes) on 3G; 6 hours, 40 mins (400 minutes) on WiFi; 4 hours and 3 mins (243 minutes) on EDGE.

Anandtech’s number confirmed and disputed some of the numbers listed by Apple, but then again they may not have tested exactly the same way. I am impressed by Apple’s depth and transparency of information as you will soon see why…

Blackberry Bold

RIM’s web site lists the following for the Bold:

• Talk time: 4 hours, 30 mins

• Standby time: 324 hours (13.5 days)

I found it interesting that there were no disclaimers evident anywhere on the web site and there were no battery life scores for internet, video or audio.

I looked long and hard and found some testing reviews by Boy Genius and Asian One that listed what I would describe as good compilation battery remarks”, but couldn’t find as detailed a review as Anandtech had for the iPhone.

BoyGenius commented that their testing had included:

• 300-500 emails a day,

• one hour of web surfing over 3G,

• Wi-Fi usually turned on, Bluetooth turned off,

• JiveTalk connected, and around one hour of phone calling (although they admitted that they didn’t normally use the BlackBerry as a phone), and that their test phone’s battery lasted from 9AM until 4:30AM (or 7 ½ hours).

The talk time figure is around what I get, but I would like to see more granularity by usage model with more details around specific usages around internet use and video playback.

Blackberry Storm

RIM’s web site lists the following for the Storm:

• Talk time: 6 hours

• Standby time: 356 hours (15 days)

As with the Bold, I also found it interesting on the Storm that there were no disclaimers evident anywhere and again there were no battery life scores for internet, video or audio.

CNet reported the following test results for the Storm:

• Talk time: 7 hours

• Music: 14 hours, 45 mins

As with the Bold, the Storm’s talk time figure is around what I get, but I would like to see more granularity by usage model with more details around specific usages around internet use and video playback.

Nokia N96

Nokia’s web site lists the following for the Nokia N96:

• Talk time: up to 150 / 220 minutes (WCDMA / GSM)

• Stand-by time: up to 8 / 9 days (WCDMA / GSM)

• Video playback: up to 5 hours (offline mode)

• Music playback: up to 14 hours (offline mode)

There is an asterisk that disclaims that Operation times may vary depending on radio access technology, used operator network configuration and usage.”

All About Symbian reported the following activities they could complete in 16.5 hours on the N96 on one charge:

• YouTube Videos: approx 1 Hour playing using the S60 browser through 3.5G

• General Web Surfing: approx 1 Hour using both WiFi and 3.5G

• Mucking about with settings and navigating menus, etc.: approx 1 hour

• Setup Profimail and synced my IMAP account, 3,200 Emails, approx 400MB using WiFi, 3.5G and GPRS

• Downloaded the AAS Podcast, approx 20MB directly on the N96, and played the file using a stereo Bluetooth headset

End users may even find this test methodology the most valuable in that it shows a day in a life” given a particular charge. This data is impossible to compare against Nokia’s corporate website, but it was nice that Nokia would, like Apple, provide video and music playback numbers. I would like to see Nokia commit to an internet battery life figure.

Conclusions

So what can we take away from this mash-up of smartphone battery life figures? First, there are some significant variances from vendor to vendor in the terminology and the information depth and transparency provided. Secondly, when a third-party review was conducted, it could sometimes be compared to the manufacturer’s specs, sometimes not. In some cases, the third-party review supported the claim, sometimes not. But that could be attributed to a difference in methodology. Net-net, not a whole lot of consistency exists with audio, video and internet battery life scoring.

My single biggest positive takeaway was the consistency with almost everyone on the usage and application of talk time” and standby time.” While not as cool as internet battery” life, if you believe that talking is the primary use for your smartphone, this is good for the consumer.

What do you think about smartphone battery life marks? How is their accuracy and value?

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. You can find him on his AMD blog, personal blog, Twitter, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

How Valuable Are Smartphone Battery Life Figures? is a post by Pat Moorhead from Notebooks.com.

But Dell was not satisfied with simply making the Dell Studio XPS 13 look good, they wanted it to be a top performer, to live up to the XPS standard of performance. That is where NVIDIA was able to add value. We helped Dell deliver the world’s first 13.3-inch notebook with two NVIDIA graphics processors.

Packed inside its seductive chassis are two GeForce GPUs. That’s right, a 13.3 inch SLI notebook. Dell equipped the Studio XPS 13 with the GeForce 9400M which redefines the notebook architecture by combining a mainstream GPU, system memory controller, and system I/O into a single chip for the smallest, most power-efficient visual computing experience ever available in notebooks. When you need a little more throttle, the Studio XPS 13 turns to the GeForce 9500M GPU, to boost performance up to 60 percent.

NVIDIA Hybrid SLI technology allows for the two GPUS to work together. With NVIDIA Hybrid SLI, users can combine the processing power of two GeForce GPUs to increase performance and experience more thrilling visuals. To extend battery life, one GPU can be shut down on-the-fly while the other GPU powers an excellent visual experience for watching HD movies, surfing the Internet, or playing casual games. No need to log out, reboot or watch the screen flicker with NVIDIA Hybrid SLI. Shifting gears is as smooth and fast as a Porsche’s paddle shifter.

The standard configuration of the Dell Studio XPS 13 features the award-winning GeForce 9400M GPU, which delivers up to five times faster graphics performance than similar Centrino 2 systems. By configuring the Studio XPS 13 with the GeForce 9500M GPU and Hybrid SLI, users can accelerate a variety of popular visual computing applications like games, photo and video editing. With both GPUs enabled in GeForce Boost, the latest PC games such as Crysis play with higher frame rates than any other 13” notebook.

Guys, the look of the Dell Studio XPS 13 makes it perfect for your wife, girlfriend or that cute little librarian you have had your eye on. She can edit digital media and watch high definition video in style. Ladies, the power under the hood makes it perfect for the metrosexual gamer in your life, too!

There’s never been so much performance in such a small stylish package…

Rene Haas is General Manager of Notebooks at NVIDIA

Dell Studio XPS 13…Sexy Notebook for Valentines Day is a post by Rene Haas from Notebooks.com.

In recent years, consumer demand for timely driver updates has outgrown the rate at which drivers are currently supplied to the market, and the explosive growth in notebooks makes this increasingly more painful for consumers. Customers need new drivers in order to be able to take full advantage of the latest games and applications.  Game developers are especially frustrated by notebook drivers as evidenced by Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, who wrote, “Unfortunately for laptops you have to get the drivers from your manufacturer. This is the secret curse of gaming on laptops.” Browse through any gaming forum and you’re sure to find countless gamers complaining of the very same limitation.

In response to out-cries like this, NVIDIA began offering a set of notebook drivers on NVIDIA.com years ago, but support was limited mainly to high-end gaming notebooks. Although this driver brought the support and performance features gamers were after, the OEM’s hotkeys no longer functioned. This is sometimes still acceptable for enthusiasts and hardcore gamers, but for mainstream users, this was still viewed as less than acceptable.

Last month, NVIDIA radically changed the way notebook users got support by announcing a new quarterly driver release program for NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on NVIDIA.com.  By leveraging an intelligent installer and modular driver design, NVIDIA’s quarterly driver release is able to provide a dramatic increase in performance and functionality without sacrificing any of the vendor-specific customizations for your particular notebook. Here, your system will maintain all original operations including hot-keys, power management functions, and system suspend/resume behaviors.

While it is true that NVIDIA did this in part to address our gaming customers, another reason was because of the fact that there are other segments that are seeing benefits of the GPU.  GPUs, once used only for games, are now being tapped to accelerated photo editing, mapping applications, game physics, distributed computing, a variety of video applications and other consumer applications. These new uses for graphics processors has been termed ‘Graphics Plus‘. As ‘Graphics Plus’ grew stronger and more successful on the desktop side, NVIDIA realized that tens of millions of notebook users also had a lot of untapped power and unused capabilities in their machines. All they needed to unlock that power was a software driver, as the GPUs already supported the technology. Graphics Plus is an important part of how NVIDIA differentiates its GPUs from the competition, so NVIDIA needed to turn ‘Graphics Plus’ on for notebook users.

The first driver from this new quarterly release schedule enabled support for the powerful NVIDIA CUDA technology on GeForce 8M and GeForce 9M GPUs. As the foundation of ‘Graphics Plus’, CUDA technology unlocks the power of the GPU’s processing cores to accelerate the most demanding system tasks and applications.

One of the most exciting features CUDA brings to notebooks with this new driver is support for PhysX technology for GPU physics effects in games. As one of the most highly-anticipated titles of 2009, Mirror’s Edge is the first game to fully take advantage of GPU physics effects throughout the entire game. Simulated glass and cloth offer large scale improvements in fidelity, while thoughtful details such as simulated weapon debris and particle effects improve realism in every encounter with the enemy.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Mirror’s Edge is not your typical PC game. PhysX brings features like physically simulated glass, cloth, smoke, wind, and particle debris to the PC version of the game. In short, the environment is significantly more lifelike as glass shatters realistically and remains in the game world. Wind from the helicopter blades can stir-up debris or glass shards, disturb smoke coming from chimneys and vents, and even cause banners and cloth to sway. Tearing collision allows weapons to shoot through transparent blinds and tear construction tarps, and weapon particles simulate weapon sparks which bounce off objects before fading. This game is a great example of the increased levels of realism and immersion made possible by NVIDIA PhysX for desktops and notebooks featuring GeForce GPUs.

NVIDIA CUDA technology offers much more than PhysX. CUDA is the world’s only C language environment that enables programmers and developers to write software to solve complex computational problems in a fraction of the time by tapping into the many-core parallel processing power of GPUs. Currently, consumers can take advantage of several CUDA-based applications for transcoding including Badaboom and TMPGEnc. CUDA-based GPU acceleration is also now available for a variety of video editing applications, including Cyberlink Power Director, MotionDSP vReveal, and ArcSoft TotalMedia Theater.  Of course, there are also a broad set of pure computational applications that are taking advantage of brute GPU computation power using CUDA, including Folding@home, SETI@home, GPUGRID and applications like MatLab.

NVIDIA’s new quarterly driver release program is a big win for notebook consumers using NVIDIA GPUs.  These drivers allow them to maintain top performance, quickly fix bugs, and unlock the same features and functionality that their desktop counterparts have. It also means NVIDIA can extend support for Graphics Plus technologies to notebooks as well as desktops. For NVIDIA, this represents a strategic move that allows NVIDIA to enable features on notebooks that are becoming more valuable to consumers. It also allows NVIDIA to offer an unprecedented level of customer service that no other GPU maker can claim.

Should your notebook feature a supported NVIDIA GPU, head over to www.nvidia.com to download the latest drivers for your system. In doing so, you can ensure you are witnessing the highest possible performance while enjoying increased productivity and functionality. As each quarter passes, NVIDIA will post a new driver to their website to ensure notebook users are getting every level of performance and compatibility they expect and deserve from their GeForce GPUs.

Rene Haas is General Manager of Notebooks at NVIDIA

Notebook Graphics Drivers Available On NVIDIA.com is a post by Rene Haas from Notebooks.com.