Nvidia to beat AMD to release on-the-fly GPU switching tech?
'SLI Power' becomes 'Hybrid SLI'
Nvidia is said to be moving forward with a plan to allow notebook computers fitted with both integrated and discrete graphics chips to flip between the two GPUs, the better to balance battery life with all-out performance.
We're not at all surprised. The latest claim is made in a Chinese-language report on HKEPC, but Register Hardware wrote about this so-called Hybrid SLI technology almost a year ago. Back then, Nvidia was said to be calling the technology 'SLI Power'.
The technique is likely to have improved over the last 11 months, hopefully to allow the GPUs to be switched without a reboot. That's certainly what AMD is working on, having announced in May this year that its M780 chipset, due early next year to support the upcoming 'Griffin' notebook CPU, will support on-the-fly GPU switching. AMD calls its take on the technology 'PowerXPress'.
Whatever it's called - PowerXPress, SLI Power or Hybrid SLI - the technique's identical: when the laptop's running on mains, it uses the discrete GPU; when it's running on batteries, the main graphics chip is powered down and the integrated engine is utilised instead. To what extent this behaviour will be open to user control remains to be seen.
Like AMD's M780, Nvidia chipsets supporting this dual-GPU technology are some way off. They won't appear until the end of the year, it's claimed.
COMMENTS
Because...
If for no other reason that that Nvidia can now sell you two chips instead of one.
Maybe they could fix SLI first ?
I have yet to see any game support forum that hasn't the first line of the top most sticky post say "disable SLI, it creates loads of problems" !
While it's certainly a good idea, I believe it's already largely dropped by gamers, due to the loads of issues with the drivers, thus pointless to use as a marketing label.
That is, until it's fixed.
Why would you want to do it this way?
Surely if you want to do something that needs a GPU then having it switch off beacause your on battery kind of defeats the point of having a laptop.
Now I can see the point of having a chipset that only powers the GPU when its features are being used. If I am logged on and checking my mail then I dont really need my GPU so no need to have it running. However once I have checked my mail and want to game for 20mins or so whilst I'm waiting for my flight then fire up my GPU.
