Nvidia improves performance, not power, ahead of E3 with new notebook GPU

Next week in Los Angeles, the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo -more familiarly known as E3- begins. Graphics company Nvidia chose Computex in Taipei this week to unveil its new GeForce GTX 560M mobile graphics processor for notebook PC gaming.

Nvidia has two lines of mobile processors, GT and GTX, respectively designed for lower and higher performance gaming. The GTX 560M that Nvidia launched this week is a semi-upgrade to the high performance line that offers a 1550MHz Processor Clock, a 775MHz Graphics Clock, 192 CUDA Cores, and up to 3GB of 192-bit 1250MHz GDDR5 RAM. Nvidia says it has better performance per watt than all previous generations of its notebook GTX GPUs, which means higher frame rates with similar battery consumption.

It doesn't raise the bar for power, though, and Nvidia's top performer in the mobile class remains the 480M, which debuted last year. What it does, however, is improve efficiency and offer up to five hours of battery life with all the bells and whistles running.

This week, PC makers Asus, Toshiba, MSI, Alienware and Alienware spin-off Origin PC showed support for the GTX 560M, which can come with or without Nvidia's year-old Optimus GPU-switching technology and Nvidia's 3D Vision rendering technology.

In addition to the products listed above, Origin PC announced it now supports the Nvidia GTX 560m on all of its EON notebook designs.

We'll be talking to Nvidia at E3 next week to hear the company's take on the mobile PC graphics market, as well as developments to the Tegra platform and smartphone/tablet graphics.