Friday, June 18, 2010
NVIDIA’s Optimus technology, a technology which will bring switchable graphics to netbooks and notebooks with NVIDIA and Intel integrated graphics has just uncovered. It was demonstrated on an upcoming notebook from ASUS (UL50Vf) (LaptopMag just reviewed it)
Switchable graphics on notebooks is nothing new but they made some nice improvements with Optimus. No longer do you need to reboot the computer to switch between discrete and dedicated graphics cards nor do you have to specifically change power plans between low and high performance.
Optimus works in the background, on the fly and will detect an appropriate time to fire up and use dedicated graphics by detecting use of DirectX, DVXA or CUDA calls that require the graphics card. There also seems to be a application database and you can set which apps you want or don’t want using Optimus. Bit-tech goes into a little more technical detail so go to the source to find out more if that interests you.
Since it’ll work with existing GeForce and Intel chipsets this technology could be put to use right now across a whole range of products from NVIDIA graphics, from nettops and netbooks and laptops of course. Support for ION 2 and Pinetrail netbooks is there.
Engadget benchmarked battery life with the UL50Vf and got 3:57 using the discrete graphics and 6:10 using integrated graphics. Since the technology will run in the background, you’ll probably get somewhere in between these times depending on what apps you use.
Videos:
Tons of coverage at the below links:
Source: Bit-Tech, Anandtech, Engadget, HotHardware, Fudzilla (5 new notebooks with Optimus / pics)
