Nvidia launches overclock-friendly GTX 980 desktop GPU for gaming laptops

Earlier this month, we covered Asus’insane water-cooled laptop and the appearance of a new Nvidia GPU that looked for all the world like a GTX 980 desktop chip in a mobile form factor. Today, Nvidia is taking the lid off that particular project — and it’s even crazier than we thought it was. Putting a GTX 980 in a notebook chassis is a bit nuts, even if these systems are only portable in the same way that a five-gallon bucket is portable.

Nvidia kills Icera soft modem, refocuses Tegra on automotive design

Nvidia posted its first quarter results yesterday, with strong growth in PC gaming and automotive sales. The GPU manufacturer also announced that it would cease all business operations related to its Icera softmodem technology, with the intent of wrapping up that segment by the second half of the year.

Killing Icera brings an end to one of the more ambitious chapters in Nvidia’s quest for mobile market domination. When Nvidia bought the company in 2011, 4G and LTE support were just beginning to roll out across the United States. After several quiet years with relatively few design wins, Nvidia came out swinging in 2013, with the simultaneous announcement of Tegra 4, 4i, and the Icera i500 stand-alone modem.

Nvidia announces ultra-high-end GTX Titan X, leaves out almost all details

Companies often play coy with announcements at major press events, but Nvidia’s latest tactic with its new GTX Titan X may take some kind of reward. The company’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, made a surprise appearance at an Unreal Engine conference and handed Unreal chief developer Tim Sweeney an autographed GPU. This new Titan X will carry an estimated eight billion transistors and a massive 12GB of RAM. But Nvidia isn’t saying more until its own GTC event.

According to Sweeney, Titan X was developed partly in response to the VR headsets and technology that are widely on display. In more plausible reality, it’s a chip in the same vein as the original GTX Titan and GTX 780 — an HPC and scientific computing GPU that Nvidia is bringing over to the consumer business.

Nvidia’s Grid moves out of beta with premium tier, free games

Streaming gaming has been the Next Big Thing for a few years now, even as hype built for the launch of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Nvidia has been at the forefront of bringing streaming titles to the PC business, and the company announced last night that it intends to take its Nvidia Grid service out of beta and formally launch it later this year, alongside its new console.

In theory, streaming games makes a great deal of sense. Players have access to vast title libraries without the need to keep track of local disks or risk broken consoles. The living room space and power consumption costs are all outsourced to a remote server, and all the player has to maintain is a fast Internet connection and pay a monthly service fee.

PowerVR goes 4K with GT7900 for game consoles

PowerVR is announcing its new high-end GPU architecture today, in preparation for both Mobile World Congress and the Game Developers Conference (MWC and GDC, respectively). Imagination Technologies has lost some ground to companies like Qualcomm in recent years, but its cores continue to power devices from Samsung, Intel, MediaTek, and of course, Apple. The new GT7900 is meant to crown the Series 7 product family with a GPU beefy enough for high-end products — including 4K support at 60fps — as well as what Imagination is classifying as “affordable” game consoles.

Report claims DirectX 12 will enable AMD and Nvidia GPUs to work side-by-side

With the Games Developer Conference right around the corner we’ve started to see more gaming and technology announcements cropping up, but a new report on DirectX 12 is certain to raise the eyebrows of any PC gamer. It’s been reported that DirectX 12 — Microsoft’s upcoming, low-latency, close(r)-to-metal API that replaces DirectX 11 — will be capable of running across AMD and Nvidia GPUs at the same time.

A “source with knowledge of the matter” told Tom’s Hardware that DirectX 12 will support asynchronous workloads across multiple GPUs, and that one extension of this support is that a task could theoretically be split between two different video cards from different manufacturers.

Nvidia slapped with class-action lawsuit over GTX 970 memory issues

Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, hasn’t directly responded to the class-action lawsuit allegations, but he has written a blog post responding to the larger situation. Said post isn’t likely to win many converts to Nvidia’s way of thinking, since Huang refers to the memory issue as a “feature,” noting that “Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.”

He then claims that this was done because games “are using more memory than ever.”

Nvidia kills mobile GPU overclocking in latest driver update, irate customers up in arms

Nvidia’s mobile Maxwell parts have won significant enthusiast acclaim since launch thanks to excellent performance and relatively low power consumption. Boutique builders and enthusiasts alike also tend to enjoy pushing the envelope, and Maxwell’s manufacturing characteristics apparently make it eminently suited to overclocking. Now, apparently, Nvidia is cracking down on these options with a driver update that removes the overclocking features that apparently some vendors sold to customers.