NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - Last month I was in Monterey Bay for NVIDIA's unveiling of their Maxwell architecture, where we saw the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 unveiled. I was blown away at what Maxwell was able to do with the GTX 980, but even more impressed with what NVIDIA is now doing to notebooks with the mobile version of the Maxwell GPU, in the GTX 970M and GTX 980M.
Notebook gamers have been asking for "desktop class performance" from NVIDIA, and now they have it. This is where the new second-generation Maxwell architecture steps in.
NVIDIA's Fermi architecture was introduced in 2010, with the GeForce GTX 480M providing around 40% of the performance that the desktop version, the GTX 480, provided. Moving onto the Kepler architecture, where the GTX 680M provided around 60% of the performance of the full-blown GTX 680 on desktop, but now the Maxwell-powered GTX 980M is delivering around 80% of the performance of the insanely-efficient GTX 980 GPU on the desktop.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M allows for 'beyond 1080p' gaming on a notebook (2560x1440 on Ultra settings), compared to 1080p Ultra gaming on the GTX 680M from last year.
When compared to the GTX 680M, we have over double the performance on the GTX 980M, which is a massive improvement.