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Kepler keeps finding more and more potentially habitable planets in our Universe—and it turns out that looking at them can be just as perplexing as thinking about them.

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At the SIGGRAPH conference going on this week, Nvidia has made a potentially huge announcement regarding the future of mobile gaming: the company is bringing its Kepler graphics architecture to mobile devices via its Project Logan next-gen mobile processor. Nvidia compares this development to the rollout of the first GPU, the GeForce 256, 14 years ago. Logan as a platform, with its Kepler GPU, jumps mobile computing ahead by the equivalent of seven years’ worth of advancement, says Nvidia.

Mobile devices haven’t had GPUs available with true, full desktop feature set support before now, Nvidia says. That includes things like better rendering and simulation techniques, like tessellation, advanced physics and anti-aliasing and the ability to calculate lighting effect rendering in a single pass. All of which is pretty technical, but ultimately means that a lot of the tricks and capabilities available to console gaming will now be brought to mobile devices.

Kepler is already in use in desktop GPUs, and in Nvidia’s desktop designs it can take on general purpose computing as well to help with the processing workload even when you’re not playing Call of Duty. Kepler on mobile can also offer this, which means that mobile apps featuring things like computational imaging, computer vision, AR or speech recognition would be able to benefit from the Kepler GPU and take advantage not only of its processing power, but also its power efficiency.

To demonstrate Kepler’s power, Nvidia released a video which showed a realistic human head model being generated in real-time. The demo itself isn’t new – it was shown off earlier this year on a desktop PC using Kepler. But this time around, the mobile Logan processor with Kepler is powering the rendering, which makes this a pretty stark proof of the kind of effect that Kepler could have on the state of mobile gaming, and mobile computing overall.

Many believe that mobile and desktop gaming are not on a collision course – each will have its place, and serve different functions owing to different graphics capabilities, control schemes and more. But with Kepler, Nvidia is showing that it’s delivering the technology to enable a further blurring of the line between desktop and mobile, and delivering it well ahead of when some people thought that might happen.

NVIDIA has been gradually lowering the base pricing for its desktop GeForce 700 series, but few outside of the hardcore gamer set would say the $399 GTX 770 was affordable. Enter the GeForce GTX 760: the Kepler-based chipset supports all the visual effects of its faster cousins, but at a more palatable $249 target price. Although it won’t rival the 770 in performance, it offers more bang for the buck than the GTX 660 it’s built to replace: the GTX 760 carries more processing cores (1,152 versus 960) and more memory bandwidth (192GB/s versus 144GB/s) while maintaining similar clock speeds. It can even punch above its weight class, as it’s reportedly up to 12 percent faster than the $299 GTX 660 Ti. Should that balance of price and performance sound especially sweet, you can pick up a GTX 760 board today from the likes of ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte and others. Several PC builders, such as Falcon Northwest, Maingear and Origin PC, are also equipping their machines with the new mid-tier graphics from day one.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Peripherals, NVIDIA

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Source: NVIDIA

We’ve already seen a couple of new desktop GTX cards from NVIDIA this month, and if the mysterious spec sheet for MSI’s GT70 Dragon Edition 2 laptop wasn’t enough of a hint, the company’s got some notebook variants to let loose, too. The GeForce GTX 700M series, officially announced today, is a quartet of chips built on the Kepler architecture. At the top of the stack is the GTX 780M, which NVIDIA claims is the “world’s fastest notebook GPU,” taking the title from AMD’s Radeon HD 8970M. For fans of the hard numbers, the 780M has 1,536 CUDA cores, an 823MHz base clock speed and memory configs of up to 4GB of 256-bit GDDR5 — in other words, not a world apart from a desktop card. Whereas the 780M’s clear focus is performance, trade-offs for portability and affordability are made as you go down through the 770M, 765M and 760M. Nevertheless, the 760M is said to be 30 percent faster than its predecessor, and the 770M 55 percent faster.

All of the chips feature NVIDIA’s GPU Boost 2.0 and Optimus technologies, and work with the GeForce Experience game auto-settings utility. The 700M series should start showing up in a host of laptops soon, and a bunch of OEMs have already pledged their allegiance. Check out a video with NVIDIA’s Mark Avermann after the break, where he shows off a range of laptops packing 700M GPUs, and helps us answer the most important question of all: can it run Crysis? (Or, in this case, Crysis 3.)

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops, Peripherals, NVIDIA

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It’s well over a year since the GTX 680 came out, but given how that card was a strong contender it may feel too early for an upgrade. NVIDIA knows the score, which is why it’s made a particular point of pitching this year’s card at owners of the GTX 580 instead. Upgraders from that GPU are pledged a 70 percent lift in performance, which is about double the gain a GTX 680 owner would see. On the other hand, something more people might notice — if NVIDIA’s slides prove to be accurate — is a 5dBA drop in noise pollution, as well a new approach to fan control that attracts less attention by varying revs less wildly in response to load. This is surprising given that most of the extra performance in this card stems from more transistors and greater power consumption, but that’s what we’re told. Feel free to hold out for our round-up of independent reviews or read past the break for further details.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, NVIDIA

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