After the launch of the GeForce GTX 1080 and the arrival of the Titan X, anyone would have thought that Nvidia would take a break, but the latest news teach us exactly the opposite. In an attempt to unify its product lines and reduce technical compromises between form factors, the green giant from Santa Clara announced the GeForce GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 graphics cards for laptops, whose performance differences compared to their desktop sisters will not be greater than ten percent, courtesy of the new Pascal architecture and greater control over frequencies.
Gaming on a laptop is more complicated than it appears. The user needs to settle for casual games and titles that have a few years on their shoulders, or invest a fortune in platforms with graphics chips that deliver inferior performance than their desktop counterparts. We all agree that a high-end GPU must yield ground to the natural limitations of the form factor, starting with power consumption and cooling. For these and other reasons we have seen several advances in external graphics cards. Thanks to that "shortcut", the user gets the best of both worlds: keeping the classic mobility of their laptop, and obtaining the graphical power demanded by the latest titles. However, Nvidia has a more "direct" alternative if you will: launching its GeForce GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 GPUs for laptops, almost with the same performance as their traditional equivalents.
The Unification Strategy
In other words, they are the same graphics chips without the classic "M" that used to highlight their mobile profile. This "unification" so to speak began with the GeForce GTX 980, which although it had an "M" variant, also arrived on the market as "GeForce GTX 980 for laptops", offering specifications very similar to the standard model. The GeForce GTX 10 series does nothing more than expand the same strategy, applying minimal changes again. The best example of these changes is found in the GeForce GTX 1070, which has a total of 1,920 CUDA cores in its desktop version, but the mobile variant raises the number to 2,048 with a reduced frequency. In essence, Nvidia seeks to maintain a performance balance between desktop and mobile chips, and from the beginning proposes that the difference be no greater than ten percent.
OEM Pressure and Pricing
These requirements place a little extra pressure on OEMs, which will not only need to maintain a minimum base frequency on the chips, but also will need to adopt more advanced cooling solutions. In fact, the GTX 10 series on laptops is the first in which Nvidia will allow factory overclocking. We are not yet sure how they are going to achieve that (the TDP on the 1080 is almost 200 watts), but the point is that it can be done. Razer, MSI, Asus and EVGA are the first four manufacturers that will offer new models of their laptops with Pascal chips inside, however, the goal is not reduced to adding the chips and that's it. Nvidia works closely with its main partners to incorporate G-Sync support at 120 Hz on the screens, and although it does not yet open the doors to a smooth 4K at 60 FPS, with minimal adjustments on video options in certain games, the experience is more than acceptable. As for prices, Nvidia confirmed that models with a GTX 1060 chip will be available starting at 1,300 dollars.
