Optimus Technology mediate between IGP and GPU
As we mentioned on the last page laptops are often equipped with both integrated graphics and discrete NVIDIA circuits (or circuits from some other company) that can be started manually, e.g. for when you’re about to ”game”. To stop you from draining the battery in no-time you have change energy profile every time you want to start or stop using a program or game that makes use of the additional GPU acceleration.
Benjamin Berraondo shows the difference Optimus Technology makes in a notebook.
The table shows two notebooks from ASUS, UL50VF and UL50VT.
Benjamin Berraondo, PR Manager UK & Northern Europe at NVIDIA, visited Stockholm to show the new technology. The comparison he made was with a race car driver that had to shut down the engine when he hit 50 and wanted to change gear to go faster. Either way the result was that very few actually took advantage of all the power available with the discrete GPU. If this was because nearly no one knew that you had to activate it manually or if the user wasn’t interested in doing all the work all the time he couldn’t say. It doesn’t matter though, it was still a major problem.
The reason for the manual change was a limitation on the hardware level, since the integrated graphics circuit and the discrete graphics circuit was separated and only connected through software.
What Optimus does is to make sure the switching is done automatically. Instead of dragging the user or energy profiles into the matter, this is handled by the NVIDIA control panel that detects applications and what is running. The technology will, according to NVIDIA, result in minimal loss of battery time and drastically improve performance in, e.g. Flash decoding and other tasks where the GPU can held. The base of the technology is let the integrated graphics circuit do all of the drawing on the screen even if the actual rendering is handled by the discrete GPU, which is only done when needed.
When you’re using applications that doesn’t require, or are unsupported, GPU acceleration everything will run normal, nothing to be excited about there. When you do run an applications that requires or supports the secondary, but more powerful graphics circuit it activates and the scenario below becomes reality:
Optimus is really what multi-GPU notebooks should have been from the very start, an experience we can all enjoy. There are no reboots required, not changing of profiles, nothing. It just works (except from when the demo machine crashed due to a driver error). Optimus is supported by more or less all Intel platforms on the note/netbook market today and pretty much all newer NVIDIA circuits.
