GeForce GTX 980 Comes to Notebooks | Hacker News Reader

GeForce GTX 980 Comes to Notebooks

blogs.nvidia.com

43 pointsrichardboegli46 comments

While this may be a great engineering feat, I would rather see mass-market external GPU enclosures become the norm once/if Thunderbolt 3 becomes mainstream.

It would be really nice for instance dual-boot a Macbook Pro for work during the day, then come home and plug in an external GPU for gaming.

Some of us have been waiting for external GPUs for nearly a decade. I'm not sure a critical mass of demand exists for this type of interface.

Value gamers stick to mainstream ATX PCs, and often do their own work, as components can be much cheaper and the labor is free (supplemented by a few internet build guides).

High-end gamers often do their own work so they can ensure quality throughout the build and verify every component. Those that don't usually only buy completed systems, and replace these very frequently.

Almost all use cases where an external card device would be useful are already served by having a desktop instead of a laptop, where the discrete GPU is almost external, an ever-increasing stack of chips, fans, and radiators sticking out of a motherboard slot.

Note that Intel is explicitly supporting external GPUs this time with Thunderbolt 3. I don't think that was the case in previous versions. It sounds more likely to happen this cycle, though as you point out it's a small market, so I don't expect it to be cheap.

http://liliputing.com/2015/08/intel-says-thunderbolt-3-will-...

http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov...

There is a limitation on the width of the bus though. I recall reading this when it first was announced and it is referenced in the linked article that you reference [1]: 40Gb/s of bandwidth – or about 5GB/s – provided by Thunderbolt 3 is tremendously lower than 15.75GB/s offered by a fully-fledged PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot.

[1] http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov...

Yes, but the bandwidth is not really needed. PCI-E data compression is a thing. You only lose like 10% performance when comparing ExpressCard (4Gbit) to native PCI-E

Sources:

http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/6578-impleme...

and specifically:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/4476434

10% is kind of a lot.

Given that the alternative is an 100% of an integrated GPU, I'd still take 90% of a dedicated desktop GPU at my laptop dock.

Single GPU setups show no performance degradation at 2.0 x16 and some/slight degradation at 2.0 x8.,

5GB/s should do just fine.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_980_PCI-Expre...

Good to see

> where the discrete GPU is almost external, an ever-increasing stack of chips, fans, and radiators

The last 3 GPU's I've bought for my primary desktop over the last ~6 years have always been bigger than the last.

There are no mass market eGPU solutions yet but a handful of DIY solutions (based on ExpresssCard or Thunderbolt 1/2 interface) are available.

The eGPU experts are actually convinced that Intel was blocking the release of several mass market-compatible GPU compatible Thunderbolt cases in the past.

I still think there are a ton of people who want something that is small and portable but still has gaming power. I could see a ton of college students getting laptops for college and then buying an external GPU so they can game when they get back to their dorm. Anyone who travels or moves around a lot could have a powerful gaming laptop when they want it, and a light and usable laptop when they want that, without the terrible battery life, huge size, and obscene price that comes with a full fledged gaming-only laptop.

How is that superior to owning a laptop and a dedicated gaming desktop? The desktop will always be the option with the fewest tradeoffs.

To get the more powerful graphics card in the desktop you must also purchase a case, power supply, processor, RAM, motherboard, SDD/HDD, keyboard, and monitor. I can't see this not outpacing the cost of just the external graphics card.

I'm treating a mouse as a must purchase for either.

Without having done the pricing, I'm betting that the laptop plus external graphics card might not be much more expensive than a low-end laptop + "good enough" gaming system. Going super high-end is going to be expensive either way and it may not matter as much since you have the coin to go all out just for gaming.

What is needed is a small sized amplifier box using thunderbolt 3.

If something could be built around an AMD Radeon R9 Nano, then it would be a serious force to be reckoned with.

A desktop is a big item to lug back and forth between a dorm/apartment and home. I tried this last year with my desktop; this year I skipped the hassle and left it behind.

Most people move their desktop as often as they move the rest of their furniture. For college students who dorm, there are small form factor cases that can still support full size GPUs and CPUs.

Many students need to take flights at least once a year if they study out of state/country or if they have some kind of internship program (my school made us alternative between school and work every 4 months, for instance). Even the smallest of the SFF cases (that support discrete GPUs) cannot be practically packed into a luggage for flights.

I know this because I own a SilverStone FTZ01 [1] and have tried to take it with me on a flight back home in May, but ended up giving up on it because it was simply too difficult to adequately protect in a luggage without going over weight limits.

A much smaller chassis with just a discrete GPU + power supply probably won't have this problem, and as a result, for my use case at least, it would be a much more practical option.

[1] http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=533

It could be very very nice 'intermediate' upgrade path for many users. Like CPU accelerators in the 80s. Your laptop is slow ? beef it up with that tiny box so you can enjoy your beloved machine a little longer. Something you can even use on a future laptop. How is my marketing-fu ?

> I would rather see mass-market external GPU enclosures become the norm once/if Thunderbolt 3 becomes mainstream.

Agreed, this would be more AWESOME, but there is a limitation on the width of the bus though. I recall reading this when it first was announced.

> dual-boot a Macbook Pro for work during the day, then come home and plug in an external GPU for gaming

Depending on what you play, with Unreal Engine 4, games can run native. Unreal Tournament runs fine on a OSX and on Linux.

external GPUs? YES, but definitely NOT proprietary thunderbolt

Doesn't this mean that the Oculus Rift can now run on notebooks? that's a pretty big deal and means they might sell a lot of these!

[1] Oculus Rift specs http://www.slashgear.com/final-oculus-rift-specs-revealed-fo...

[2] GeForce GTX 980 outperforms GTX 970: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-980-vs-GeForce-GTX-970

I think that has been specifically mentioned in some of the articles as the 970 is the minimum required GPU.

"The new GTX 980 notebook offers a great portable option for the Oculus #Rift. We're excited to see high-performance notebooks powering #VR!"

https://twitter.com/oculus/status/646348068594413568

latency is still terrible on nvidia, using proprietary (as always) nvidia API you get usual no tricks AMD latency

This thing guzzles up to 300 watts under load. There is no way this chip is not going to be throttled to death in a laptop form factor, unless the laptop itself makes more fan speed than a 747. I personally own a Gigabyte Brix Pro i7 and it gets hot and throttled as soon as you load the 8 cores, and this is a 65 watt TDP. Sure, this monster-chip-in-a-notebook pitch sounds great in the press release. It's not going to be a good piece of engineering.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-re...

The 9xx series has pretty good power management. In practice even at 4k resolutions a 980 or 980ti will spend a lot of time running below 100% TDP.

Also, those measurements in the anandtech article are total system power, not GPU power, which is why the idle measurement is in the 70w range. (Modern GPUs generally do not pull down 70w at idle.)

One of the upsides to having a really high-spec GPU in a laptop is that as long as the power management is done properly, it can burst up to full speed to get you low latency for rendering and then drop back down to idle. In sustained rendering scenarios (like games) it may end up thermal/acoustic/power throttled, but that happens on desktops anyway - it will just throttle quicker and scale down a bit more.

Point taken on the total system power, but it's still 165 watt TDP. Agreed for "burst" workflows it'll be fine. But how many people have "burst" workflows that need a mobile 980? This thing is for gamers and they'll be maxing it for hours at a time, or (I personally) would be maxing it for GPU compute. I just think it's being done for publicity and that this is not really a serious use case for a chip like this. Indeed this whole "my chip number is bigger than yours" game is not seeing increases in real life performance because of aggressive throttling. I'm seeing lower-power chips beating throttled higher-power chips in small form factor computers.

You know how merciless gamers can be. Nvidia better be sure that the systems sporting this chip can achieve 980-style expectations, because otherwise these guys will light up the forums with criticism.

What I'd like to see is a return to single slot video cards for desktop PCs, which should be entirely possible if they're cramming a 980 into a laptop. The monstrosities that AMD and Nvidia keep cranking out every year are just absurd at this point, especially if you care about form factor or power consumption.

You can find single-slot cards on the market.

Hardly. Mostly they're low-spec professional cards.

No single slot cooler will handle a 250 watt chip without making a racket.

AMD Radeon R9 Nano was specifically designed for this [1]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9621/the-amd-radeon-r9-nano-re...

Any word on what the power consumption is? This seems like a great way to get a painfully hot laptop with awful battery life.

There are a few comments on external GPUs/form factor/heat here. The thing is, this laptop is nowhere near a laptop form factor: https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zQi8qkv6X9tGfH4lsA6QsZ8lU5U...

From: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/9251275/asus-gx700-water-co...

(It's basically an external enclosure bolted on to a laptop...)

I spoke with a laptop reseller a few minutes ago and according to him, the 980 will only fit in laptops thicker than 1" - so it will not be available in a slimmer, lighter gaming laptops like the MSI Ghost series.

Thinnest notebook from GTX 980 launch lineup is Aorus X7 DT:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-98...

While it's not yet listed on Aorus site, it's quite likely chassis would be same/similar to its older sibling Aorus X7 Pro:

http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X7%20Pro-SYNC

This was 2x GTX 970M SLI model, pretty slim at ~23 mm with 3 kg weight.

I wonder though how well cooling will work with GTX 980. All previous Aorus models kinda struggled with cooling, and that was with less powerful GPUs (albeit SLI).

Out of announced notebooks, the least weird ones are MSI GT72 and Clevo P775DM:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/News/_nc2/G...

Pity they didn't include also 15" sibling of that Clevo chassis (P750DM). That one would be pretty awesome.

From your reference:

The first notebooks with the GTX 980 GPU will come by the end of this month. [1]

[1]: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-98...

I feel like overclockability is the last thing Nvidia should be focusing on for laptops. The trade-off for overclocking is heat generation which is undesirable for laptops by far. These cards generate a lot of heat as is.

I don't think people are expecting these to be laptops, exactly. More like very portable "desktops". I know a lot of people in the VR community are going bonkers over this announcement. It's going to make setting up demos a hell of a lot easier. Nvidia's Optimus technology (don't ask me what it was for, I could never keep it straight) was a serious impediment to achieve low tracking latency, to the point of being downright impossible. I even once returned a laptop with a 980M the same day I got it after I found out Optimus basically made it useless to use with my DK2.

I probably won't buy one of these. I'll probably just stuff my desktop into an aluminum case suitcase. But you could pull the battery out and throw it away for all the VR folks care. This will get setup on a table at conferences by a lot of people.

This is great, but I was expecting notebook gaming to go the streaming way. What's stopping game streaming from becoming mainstream? Latency?

OnLive tried that. They're gone.

Yes, latency is the biggest problem. The absolute best case scenario is that you have a direct fiber connection to your ISP, which is hosting servers locally. Then it would probably be acceptable.

Realistically, with a standard consumer broadband connection you're adding tens of milliseconds on top of everything else, which completely ruins a lot of action games.

However! If you've got a desktop gaming PC at home, you can now play games from your laptop (or TV) with Steam in-home streaming. They don't even have to be Steam games. Over a wired LAN it's fantastic, and on WiFi it's still pretty good.

I wonder what the thermal budget looks like. I can't imagine that it can run at full crank for an extended period of time.

Agreed. Also, unless they've managed to massively cut down on the power requirements, the 980 would burn through your battery rapidly.

When is this available for purchase?

This is AWESOME.

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