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Once upon a time, not so long ago, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 980 was the fastest single-chip graphics processor on the market. And now, in a sense, it is again. This week, the company has announced that the GTX 980 has migrated across to the gaming laptop space, its hardware spec completed unaltered from its desktop iteration. According to the firm, a GTX 980 in the laptop form-factor is 35 per cent faster than the current performance king, the GTX 980M. Based on the hands-on benchmarking we carried out, the claims have merit.So, what's the difference between the GTX 980 and existing GTX 980M for notebooks? It's no secret that laptop components that carry the same product name as their desktop equivalents, even when the performance differential is substantial. The current GTX 980M is based on the same processor as the desktop version - codenamed GM204 - but the CUDA core count drops from 2,048 to 1,536 while maximum 'boost' clock speeds are more limited: Nvidia's GPUs scale up frequency according to thermal and power limits, and obviously these are more constricted in a small laptop chassis. On top of this, memory speeds are also reduced too. It's easy to understand why - fewer cores at lower clocks combined with slower RAM still give a lot of performance, but the energy savings are substantial.
The GTX 980 for notebooks, described in some leaks as the 'GTX 990M', reverses all of these compromises. The full GM204 chip with the complete complement of shaders is available to gaming laptop users for the first time, and despite the thermal challenges, Nvidia reckons that at least we should see the same base clock as the desktop version (this may vary according to the chassis). Boost varies from game to game (and it's unlikely to fully match the desktop card here in all scenarios), but full 7gbps memory bandwidth is also confirmed - an area where pre-reveal leaked specs had suggested lower throughput. According to Nvidia, GTX 980 in a laptop should hand in performance within three per cent of its output in its more traditional desktop environment.
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