NVIDIA's Optimus Looks to Gain Steam, Support from Apple

[Rob Williams]

On the desktop side, NVIDIA is heavily relying on its GF100 architecture to help rejuvenate both its desktop division and revenue, but on the mobile side, it's Optimus that looks to give the company a dominant lead in the marketplace. Given the technology, it almost seems like a given that it will happen, because it will give mobile warriors the best of both worlds, great battery-life and solid gaming performance.

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You can read the rest of our news post here.

 

[Doomsday]

Nvidia and Intel join forces, erm GPU tech, to take on their enemy, AMD!!

Nvidia:'The enemy(Intel) of my enemy(AMD), is a Frieend!'

 

[crowTrobot]

^AMD has their Fusion coming out which although is much better than Intel's IGP probably won't have the power saving advantages that Optimus offers. Nvidia left a bad taste in my mouth with their overheating mobile GPUs though, but on a smaller process + igp switching + better design the overheating problem shouldn't surface anymore.

This is probably why Jen Hsun was sucking up to Apple a few months ago. lol So they can secure this deal which is HUGE for them.

 

[b1lk1]

I really like this technology. My ASUS UL80VT doers have switching graphics between the X4500 and the G210M and it is relatively seamless, BUT, I have to do the switching. No big deal to me, but having the software do it AND having the Nvidia driver software doing it is quite a nice thing. I know I only have the one ASUS driver with little hope ASUS will ever update it so Optimus is THE way to go in my mind.

 

[Rob Williams]

This is probably why Jen Hsun was sucking up to Apple a few months ago. lol So they can secure this deal which is HUGE for them.

Hah, no doubt... these CEO's are all alike. Suck up to anyone you have to in order to get the job done. In actuality, Optimus should be able to sell itself. Even without sucking-up, Apple should <em>want</em> this kind of feature on its notebooks.

BUT, I have to do the switching. No big deal to me, but having the software do it AND having the Nvidia driver software doing it is quite a nice thing.

That's just it. To have it completely seamless is nice... you just never have to worry about it. I could see some other uses for this aside from gaming, too. This will no doubt be available in ION2, which will be of a huge advantage to netbook users. Atom by itself is too slow to handle HD content, so imaging loading up a video and having it work just fine, due to the GPU switching. I love the idea.

 

[RobbyBob]

I'm actually growing quite tired of nVidia for the most part. On the desktop side of things, they're re-branding the same cards over and over again. That is, until their release of gf100 next month. They've been relying on their old products and advertising muscle to keep them going.

At least they've been taking new steps in other directions though, I guess.

 

[Brett Thomas]

It always happens with the winner, though. I was cursing NV when they sat on their laurels with the 7-series cards, which were really pretty much fine-tuned 6-series. then they came out with the 8's and put ATI on its ear. Now, the ATI line is really the better one - it's cyclical.

As for Optimus, I'm excited about this. Though I will say that now that flash GPU accel is in ALL OS's (Even 64b 'Nix), I can't say I see Rob's worry about HD Video - ION did fine with actual video files, and I thought it was used a lot more than just an Atom for netbooks. Could be wrong though. For the most part, where you saw choking on netbooks was streaming video like Hulu, which is now fixed.

I've always been a huge fan of mobile processing because I view it to be the future - the huge 16-core dataclusters we can now buy as a personal PC usually go to tremendous waste. So anything that can make a tiny computer last longer while performing more like its desktop equivalents is a big win in my book.

 

[Kougar]

Though I will say that now that flash GPU accel is in ALL OS's (Even 64b 'Nix), I can't say I see Rob's worry about HD Video - ION did fine with actual video files, and I thought it was used a lot more than just an Atom for netbooks.

Are you sure that it is? I thought GPU acceleration was only available under the beta flash plugin, which few have and was easy to break depending on quite a few factors. I'm not sure about the 2nd beta, but the original only worked on select types of flash videos and NVIDIA drivers.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

The acceleration is limited to h.264 video and some raster/vector based processing on mobile devices. From the release notes...

Graphics hardware acceleration (mobile only)
A GPU-based vector renderer replaces the software renderer on smartphones and other mobile devices, resulting in faster rendering performance for more expressive user experiences while consuming less power. Supports hardware acceleration of all rendering, including vector graphics, bitmaps, 3D effects, filters, color transforms, alpha, device and embedded text, Saffron type, and cacheAsBitmap.

H.264 video hardware decoding
Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead across mobile devices and PCs. Using available hardware to decode video offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance, reducing system resource utilization, and preserving battery life.

Supported cards are basically anything made in the last 2 years, Nvidia Ion and 8 series +, and Ati cards 4 series + (but i can confirm some 3 series work) with driver 9.11+. Also MacOS and Linux are not supported at present unfortuneately.

In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.

Release Notes for beta 3 here. (PDF)

In all honesty though, Flash hardware support is too little too late. But under these circumstances, the IGP of one of these hybrid system should handle any h.264 playback without kicking the main GPU into gear. This is definitely a technology worth keeping an eye on though.

 

[b1lk1]

One very important thing to factor in is that people are really expecting ALOT from notebooks nowadays and they are really pushing the envelope with design. There was a time noone would expect a sub $2K notebook to game and now there are $800 models that do quite well. Now we are starting to expect 8+ hour battery life so this can only be attained by IGP in any laptop with sufficient dedicated GPU for gaming. The more we ask the more we need this type of tech. I still stand by the simple push of a button on my notebook and that being too much for some people out there is laughable. But eveyrone demands it being done for us at all costs........