First look at Nvidia’s new GeForce 9-series laptop graphics cards

Nvidia recently revealed that their G92 GPU will soon be released in its mobile guise, but so far the company has been very tight-lipped over the details. However, Justin of Xotic PC, a US-based gaming PC and laptop manufacturer, has just posted 3DMark scores and the specs of the new GeForce 9800M GT graphics card on the notebookreview.com forums.

The screenshots do leave room for speculation on some points however. As you can see in this screenshot, GPU-Z tells us that the GeForce 8800M GTX card was based on the G92 GPU design whereas the GeForce 9800M GT uses a new GPU design called '060B'. This name doesn't follow Nvidia's typical codename naming convention so could indicate anything from an error with GPU-Z to the GeForce 9800M GT being a totally new and unknown design.

GPU-Z also reports that the 9800M GT only has 6 ROPs, a full 10 ROPs less than the GeForce 8800M GTX. ROPs are usually laid out in sets of four, making 6 a peculiar number. This could either be caused by GPU-Z reading the amount of ROPs in the GeForce 9800M GT incorrectly or it could be reading 6 sets of 4 ROPs, making a total of 24.

Clock speeds remain the same as with the GeForce 8800M GTX, with a 500MHz core, 799Mhz (1.598Ghz effective) memory and the stream processors running at 1.250GHz. The hardware produced results of 9,682 3DMark06 points, with 3DMark Vantage hitting P4130 in the test system which used an Intel Core 2 Xtreme X9100 mobile CPU.

Kobalt Computers' Neil Richards has also played with the new laptop GPU and told us, “What I can confirm for definite is that the performance of the 9800M GT is marginally better than an 8800M GTX, and £130 ex VAT cheaper”. That the 9800M GT will knock the previously reigning 8800M GTX from its pedestal and cost less can only be a good thing for mobile gaming, bringing down the often high cost associated with gaming on the go.

The launch of the mobile 9-series coincides with Intel’s launch of the new Centrino 2 yesterday, so the next generation of gaming laptops are just round the corner. Centrino 2 is the long-awaited update to the incredibly successful Centrino platform, and brings new 45nm Penryn processors (including the new Xtreme X9100), 802.11/n Wi-Fi, optional DDR3 memory support and Wi-MAX to laptops. We expect to have laptops based on all this new technology in the next two weeks.
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