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Every time a new GPU launches, it finds its way into half a dozen or more cards from different manufacturers. These manufacturers do their best to differentiate these cards from one another, usually by means of different fans, form factors, outputs, prices, or even a built-in overclock. It can sometimes be difficult to keep these differences straight – price comparisons are usually pretty easy to make on sites like Amazon or Newegg, but information about dimensions and clock speed can be more difficult to come by. So, I'd like to try something a little different.

I'd like to gather all of the information on these cards that I can from press releases, manufacturer product pages, and retailer sites, put it all in one place in an easy-to-parse format, and then distill it to help all of you make better buying decisions. This shouldn't be confused with one of our in-depth hardware reviews, nor am I necessarily trying to recommend one card over another – while one person may want a larger cooler or a higher stock clock, another person may need the shortest card they can find for a cramped case. If you find this helpful (or if it's missing something important that would make it more helpful to you), please give me feedback and let me know what you'd like to see!

The GPU I'm looking at today is the newly-released (and recently reviewed) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores, a low-end enthusiast card that trades blows with AMD's Radeon HD 6950 in most of our benchmarks (though it consistently beats the 6950 in the "longest, silliest name" benchmark). At present, there are five of these cards available on Newegg: one each from MSI, Gigabyte, and Zotac, and two from EVGA. The table below lays out the important numbers for you.

 

Gigabyte

MSI

Zotac

EVGA (FTW)

EVGA (Classified)

Core Clock

732 MHz

880 MHz

765 MHz

797 MHz

797 MHz

Memory Clock (Effective)

950 MHz (3800 MHz)

1002 MHz (4008 MHz)

950 MHz (3800 MHz)

975 MHz (3900 MHz)

975 MHz (3900 MHz)

Shader Clock

1464 MHz

1760 MHz

1530 MHz

1594 MHz

1594 MHz

Dimensions (in mm)

280 x 136.6 x 43

243 x 115 x 42

228.6 x 111.3 x 33.5

228.6 x 111.15 x ??

266.7 x 111.15 x ??

Outputs

DVI-I, DVI-D, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, Mini HDMI

2x DVI-I, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, Mini HDMI

Power connectors

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

6-pin, 8-pin

Included cables

DVI to VGA, Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, Molex to 6-pin adapter, Mini HDMI to HDMI dongle

DVI to VGA, 2x Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, 2x Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, Mini HDMI to HDMI, Molex to 6-pin adapter, 8-pin adapter

Warranty

3-year

3-year

2-year

3-year

3-year

Price (Newegg)

4.99

9.99

9.99

9.99

9.99

Common to all of these cards is 1280MB of GDDR5 memory on a 320-bit bus, dual-slot coolers, and manuals with driver CDs (though I imagine most of you reading this will toss out the manual and get new drivers directly from NVIDIA, as well you should). Now that we have all of the data, let's analyze it.

Gigabyte

Gigabyte's card gets a lot of "mosts" in this comparison – it's the most  expensive of the bunch, it has the most fans (3), and as a result of this massive cooler it's also the longest, tallest, and widest (we don't have width measurements for either EVGA card, but they're both smaller than this card in the other dimensions). This cooler, called the "Windforce 3X" in Gigabyte's press release, uses a vapor chamber to circulate heat. The three fans are said to be "ultra quiet" but no specific noise levels are given.

Despite this impressive cooling solution, Gigabyte is also the only manufacturer to adhere to NVIDIA's reference clock speeds for both the core and memory. I imagine that cooler could get enterprising overclockers some nice results, but Gigabyte won't be meeting you halfway.

The last item of note is that the Gigabyte card is the only one with a DVI-D port – the others all use two DVI-I ports. Along with its full-size HDMI and DisplayPort options, you should be able to plug just about any display into this thing. 

MSI

 

MSI's card, tied with Zotac's offering for second-most expensive, also comes with a fancy cooler, but is 40 mm shorter in length than the Gigabyte card. It's not the shortest card of the bunch, but it's not far off. MSI claims that the cooler, their well-reviewed Twin Frozr III (loving these names, by the way), is both 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the reference design, though "reference" in this case likely means NVIDIA's GTX 570 reference cooler since NVIDIA doesn't have a reference design for the GTX 560 Ti w/448 cores. MSI's specs list the card as being only 30dB loud at full speed – this is very impressive on paper (we recorded 43dB at idle and 47.1dB at load for the Zotac card's single-fan cooler), though keep in mind that this information comes from marketing materials and not hard data.

This card is also the fastest clocked of the group, with a roughly 17% faster core and 10% faster memory clock out of the box. If you don't want to venture into the potentially warranty-voiding field of overclocking, the MSI card may be your best bet for slightly higher frame rates.

With respect to outputs, this card is one of the most limited here – just two DVI-I ports and a Mini HDMI port (a Mini HDMI to HDMI dongle is included), which has been NVIDIA's common reference configuration for the GTX 500 series. It shouldn't be a problem for most, but if you use DisplayPort you'll want to invest in an adapter.

Zotac

 

If you read our GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores review, this card will be familiar to you – this is the only one of the lot that we've actually had in our hands, and we came away fairly impressed by its performance, its array of outputs, and its cooler. Thanks to this single-fan cooler, it's tied with the EVGA FTW card for the shortest card in the group, but it only sports a modest 4% core overclock. It's also the only card of the lot  with a 2-year warranty instead of a 3-year warranty.

It ties with the MSI card for second-most expensive at 9.99, but it does appear to be the only card in the list that includes a game (Battlefield 3). Note that information on things like this can be hard to come by – the only place where the inclusion of Battlefield 3 is apparent is in our review and in the product photos on Newegg, two resources unavailable for the rest of these cards (for most of the others, Newegg has only pictures of the card and the box). If you don't already have Battlefield 3 and you want it, this card's value becomes much more competitive.

EVGA (FTW)

If price is your primary concern, this may be the card for you – of these five, the FTW-series card is the only one selling at NVIDIA's MSRP of 9. Its single-fan cooler ties it with the Zotac for smallest card here. The difference is that the EVGA card appears to use a partially shrouded cooler that only exhausts air out the front and rear, as opposed to the Zotac's open and perforated cooler.

This card's core and memory clocks are just a bit higher than Zotac's: an 8% overclock on the core and a 2.6% overclock on the memory. It's not much, but it's probably worth a few FPS. Output selection is also good – two DVI-I ports, full-size HDMI and a DisplayPort make this a solid-looking card, and if you don't need Battlefield 3 or a fancy cooler you may as well save yourself the (or , compared to the Gigabyte).

EVGA (Classified)

The EVGA Classified card's 8-pin power plug makes it a bit of an oddball – but we suspect EVGA is using a GTX 580 PCB here instead of a GTX 570 PCB as they did on the FTW. The core and memory speeds are the same as in the FTW-series card, so as with the other Classified cards this is really geared towards end-user overclocking rather than a factory overclock.

At any rate, the Classified-series card includes a large two-fan cooler that makes it the second longest in our lineup, though it's less wide than the Gigabyte cooler by a fair amount. For the price difference (this is the second cheapest card here), overclockers may prefer this to the FTW model for its cooling power and PCB, and to the Gigabyte and MSI cards for its slightly lower price, though overclocking speeds are of course never guaranteed.

Compared to the FTW model, DisplayPort users should note that this card regresses a bit in terms of available output – two DVI-I ports and a Mini HDMI port are all that's available, though like the MSI card EVGA is kind enough to include a Mini HDMI to HDMI adapter.

Two days after the public release of Android 4.0.1 (Ice Cream Sandwich), NVIDIA had it up and running on ASUS' announced but not-yet-released Eee Pad Transformer Prime. NVIDIA sent along a video as proof. The usual big-company red tape kept the video from being released until now. There's not too much we can learn from the video other than the OS is up and running on Tegra 3, and the UI seems to be reasonably quick. 

Keep in mind the act of porting Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) to a platform similar to one that already runs Honeycomb isn't that big of a deal. It's the optimization, driver work and bug hunting that will occupy the majority of the coming weeks for companies looking to get ICS running on their hardware.

This video doesn't change the launch plans for ASUS' Eee Pad Transformer Prime: it will still launch (and be reviewed with) Honeycomb.

I've also heard ICS is up and running on Tegra 2, although obviously not featured here. The priority for everyone (read: OEMs) right now is the latest and greatest, but given the similarities between Tegra 2 and Tegra 3, I wouldn't expect the former to be too far behind.

CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has announced that the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is developing a hybrid supercomputer using its CPUs and GPUs.

The system will employ Nividia’s Tegra ARM CPUs combined with its Cuda GPUs. The BSC’s aim is to build a system, in the not too distant future, that is between two and five times better in terms of energy efficiency than today’s most efficient systems. Nvidia is showing off the design at this week’s SC11 conference in Seattle.

“In most current systems, CPUs alone consume the lion’s share of the energy, often 40 percent or more,” said Alex Ramirez, leader of the Mont-Blanc Project. “By comparison, the Mont-Blanc architecture will rely on energy-efficient compute accelerators and ARM processors used in embedded and mobile devices to achieve a four- to 10-times increase in energy-efficiency by 2014.”

BSC said its ultimate goal is deliver exascale-level performance but using between 15 and 30 times less power than current supercomputer architectures. The project will explore next generation high performance computing architectures and develop applications for the technologies.

Nvidia also announced plans to develop a hardware and software development kit (SDK) to support demand for similar ARM initiatives. The kit will apparently feature a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with a discrete GPU and will be available in the first half of next year. µ

We’re here on the USS Hornet attending NVIDIA’s GeForce LAN 6 event, where NVIDIA has just finished a kick-off keynote and product announcement between rounds of gaming. While NVIDIA has held LAN parties in the past, they don’t traditionally use them to announce new products. But the reality of the GPU product cycle is that with Kepler due in 2012 NVIDIA won’t be launching any major new consumer GPUs this fall, so instead the fall is being dedicated to their ecosystem products and GeForce LAN 6 is being used as the launch event for those products. So while today’s announcement isn’t a new GPU, it is still quite relevant to gaming.

This evening at GeForce LAN 6 NVIDIA has announced a pair of technologies: 3D Vision 2 glasses, and 3D LightBoost. The 3D Vision 2 glasses are the long awaited replacement for NVIDIA’s earlier 3D Vision wireless glasses, and feature a new fit and larger lenses. Meanwhile 3D LightBoost is an interesting monitor adaptation that increases the amount of light that get through NVIDIA's 3D Vision glasses by turning a monitor's backlight off and on to allow the glasses to stay open longer. The two are being introduced tonight as complementary technologies.

SERIAL LITIGATOR Rambus has been grilled over allegations that it destroyed documents that would harm it in a legal dispute against Nvidia.

US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Judge Kathleen O’Malley, one of three hearing the case, wasn’t best pleased with Rambus’ legal filings after the firm admitted that it had destroyed documents. Judge O’Malley said, “You admit you have no idea what was destroyed! You have no record of what was destroyed!”

Judge O’Malley wasn’t done yet, claiming Rambus had selectively kept documents that would help the firm in its case against Nvidia. “Remember, you saved the ones that helped you and destroyed the ones that hurt you,” said the judge.

The dispute between Nvidia and Rambus has run long and deep, with Nvidia having to pay Rambus somewhere between one and two per cent royalties on memory controllers to flog products in the US. The US International Trade Commission ruled that Nvidia infringed three of Rambus’ patents, though it didn’t address the question of whether Rambus had destroyed documents that could have been used against it.

In separate cases involving Rambus, Micron and Hynix, it was discovered that Rambus did indeed destroy documents inappropriately. Those cases have since been remanded back down to lower courts for further consideration.

Rambus claims that the documents were destroyed as part of its normal business practices. However, if the court finds that Rambus employed dirty tricks to hide damaging evidence, Nvidia could end up saving a bit of cash and getting one over on a company that is widely disliked in the information technology industry. µ

This afternoon (and yesterday) we had a chance to meet with a number of SoC vendors who have partnered with Microsoft for Windows 8. Each of them has their own individual reference tablet running Windows 8, and today we had a chance to survey the landscape and get photos of all the tablets. We started with ARM, then looked at x86 based tablets. Of course, the real goal with Windows 8 is to abstract as much of the difference between these two platforms away. 

Unfortunately, all of the ARM vendors were required to keep their tablets under glass and out of the way of physical contact per Microsoft instruction. Microsoft isn't ready to show off the ARM version of Windows 8 for a variety of reasons at this point (at least without a Microsoft rep. present), but we still got a chance to at least take a look at what there is now. Microsoft is encouraging tablet makers to target either a 10.1" or 11.6" form factor with 1366×768 resolution (ed: Metro will require 1024×768 as a minimum, so 1280×720 displays don't meet Microsoft's requirements).

Texas Instruments

First up is TI, whose development platform was demoed playing back the 1080p30 H.264 baseline video shown in the keynote fluidly in windows media player with a split-screen view. One tablet displayed the start menu, another displayed two split screen games. TI's development platform as shown right now is running on OMAP 4430, which again consists of two ARM Cortex A9s at 1.0 GHz and PowerVR SGX 540 graphics. Windows 8 won't launch on OMAP 4430, however, instead it'll launch on the more powerful OMAP 4470 platform with PowerVR SGX544 graphics and a 2D display compositor. The reason is partly due to SGX544 having full Direct3D 9.3 compliance, partly because it's an all around faster platform. I'm told that right now there's some Direct3D emulation going on as well for all the SoCs that don't support Direct3D 9.3. 

I also recorded a short video showing the TI Windows 8 tablet in action.

Qualcomm

My next stop was Qualcomm, whose current development tablet runs on an MSM8660 SoC, which consists of two scorpion cores and Adreno 220 graphics. Qualcomm took the tablet out of the glass box for us and showed a quick demonstration of the start menu scrolling back and forth, and the IE10 mobile view working and scrolling around. 

Unfortunately we weren't allowed to shoot video of the tablet while that demo was running, but we did grab some photos of the tablet without the glass box. Performance on the start menu looked to be above 30fps the whole time but not buttery smooth like the x86 tablets we've seen so far.

Just like TI, Qualcomm won't go to market with the SoC they're demonstrating Windows 8 working on today, instead they'll use the more powerful dual core Krait MSM8960 at first and quad core Krait APQ8064 later on. Dual core krait SoCs (eg 8960, 8270, 8260A) come with Adreno 225, quad core krait (APQ8064 and others) come with Adreno 320, both of which are Direct3D 9.3. 

NVIDIA

We've seen NVIDIA's Kal-El quad-core A9 based tablet a few times now, and found it out on the floor, also behind glass. Unlike the other vendors, NVIDIA hasn't said anything about going to market for Windows 8 with anything but Kal-El, and I don't see any reason why they should either.

The Kal-El development tablet was seated in a nice looking dock with what looks like one USB 3.0 port and a full size HDMI port.

AMD

Switching over to the x86 camp, we have AMD, who showed us two tablets running on Brazos – the Acer Iconia Tab W500 and MSI WindPad 110W, which use a C-50 and Z-01 APU, respectively. Displays on these are 1280×800 and support capacitive touch just like you'd expect for Windows 8.

Both the MSI WindPad and Iconia Tab felt snappy and responsive running the same Windows 8 Developer Preview build that we've used on the Samsung developer hardware. Subjectively, the WindPad's capacitive panel was more responsive and less prone to errant touch recognition than the Iconia, though both were more than useable with Windows 8. 

Intel

Last but not least is Intel's own development tablet, which is running an unnamed 32nm SoC. Intel was suspiciously silent about which particular SoC was inside this device, and you'll notice that it too is locked down in a plastic box, lumping it squarely in the next-gen SoC category for Microsoft.

It's possible this is Medfield, it's also possible this is some 2nd gen 32nm Atom SoC. Hopefully we'll find out more as Windows 8 starts getting closer to launch. 

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What’s in a Benchmark? This is a pertinent question that all users need to ask themselves, because if you don’t know what a benchmark actually tests and how that relates to the real world, the scores are meaningless. Today, AMD has announced that they are resigning from BAPCo over a long standing dispute over the weighting of scores within the SYSmark suite. AMD specifically references SYSmark 2012 (SM12), but there have been complaints in the past and the latest release is apparently the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

You can read more about the decision on Cheif Marketing Officer (CMO) Nigel Dessau’s blog, but this announcement comes at an interesting time since BAPCo just shipped us copies of the final SM12 release. We haven’t had a chance to run the suite yet, and we’ll still have a look at the results and see how AMD and Intel platforms compare at some point, but it looks like we have a foregone conclusion: Intel will come out ahead. What we really need to examine is why Intel gets a better score.

If you’ve been reading AnandTech for any length of time, you’ll know that we place a lot more weight on real-world benchmarks rather than synthetic tests, but certain tasks can be very difficult to test in a meaningful way. How do you measure every day tasks like surfing the web in a meaningful way when most CPUs are 95% idle performing that task? When we really look at the market right now, in many cases we can conclude that just about any current computer will be fast enough for 90% of users. If you want to surf the Internet, write email, work in Office applications, watch some movies, listen to music, etc. you can do that on anything from a lowly AMD Brazos netbook to a hex-core monster system. Yes, we did leave out Atom, because there are certain areas where it falls short—specifically, certain movie formats prove to be too much for the current Atom platform, particularly if you’re looking at HD H.264 content (e.g. YouTube and Hulu).

Reading through AMD’s announcement and Nigel’s blog, it’s pretty clear what AMD is after: they want the GPU to play a more prominent role in measurements of overall system performance. On the one hand, we could say that AMD is simply trying to get benchmarks to favor their APUs, since Brazos and Llano easily surpass the Intel competition when it comes to graphics and video prowess. This would certainly be true, but then we also have to consider what users are actually doing with their PCs. SYSmark has always included a variety of tests, and certainly knowing how fast your computer is in regards to Excel performance can be useful. However, AMD claims that a disproportionate weight is given to some tests, with mention of optical character recognition and file compression activities in particular.

We don’t have the full SM12 whitepaper yet, but we can look at the list of applications that are tested, and a few things immediately stand out. There are two web browsers in the list, but both versions are now outdated. Internet Explorer 8 has been replaced by Internet Explorer 9, and Firefox 3.6 is replaced by Firefox 4.0—with Firefox 5 just around the corner. Without newer browsers, HTML5 is basically untested by SM12, and while we understand that SM12 has been in development for a while, for something calling itself 2012 to include mostly 2010 applications feels out of place. Considering IE9 and FF4 both shift to GPU-accelerated engines, AMD would certainly have benefited from the use of the latest versions. The remaining applications look reasonable, but again we have no information on weighting of scores, so we’ll have to see how the results pan out.

Ultimately, the main thing to take away from all of this is that, just like the PCMark, 3DMark, Cinebench, SunSpider, etc. benchmarks we routinely refer to, SYSmark 2012 is merely one more tool to analyze system performance. It will be interesting to see how other elements—like the presence or lack of an SSD—impact the score. In our opinion most users would benefit far more from running something like Llano with an SSD as opposed to Sandy Bridge with an HDD, so the CPU/GPU/APU are not the only factors, but it still depends on your intended use. If you’re running a server, obviously the demands placed on the system will be far different from the average home computer. Multimedia professionals that spend a lot of time in Adobe Photoshop and/or Premiere likewise have different needs.

Is AMD right? Is heterogeneous (e.g. CPU and GPU working together) computing more important now than raw CPU performance, or is SYSmark12 merely proving what we already know: Sandy Bridge is really fast? Let us know what you think, but as always remember that when you’re looking at benchmark charts, take a minute to think about what the bars actually represent. The full news release is below, but again you can find substantially more detail in Dessau’s blog.

Update: It turns out AMD is not the only party to have left the BAPCo consortium recently. We've just confirmed with NVIDIA that they have also left the BAPCo consortium. No reason was given.

Update 2: BAPCo has released a statement in return. The consortium notes that AMD approved 80% of the development milestones and that AMD was never threatened with expulsion. The full statement is attached below.

Update 3: We've finally gotten official confirmation (as rumored earlier) that VIA has also left the consortium. They have sent a short statement to SemiAccurate which we have included below. The basis of their complaints are much the same as AMD's: they don't consider SYSMark 2012 to reflect real world usage.

AMD Will Not Endorse SYSmark 2012 Benchmark

— AMD Separates from Association with Industry Group BAPCo —

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — 21, 2011 — AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it will not endorse the SYSmark 2012 Benchmark (SM2012), which is published by BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corporation). Along with the withdrawal of support, AMD has resigned from the BAPCo organization.

“Technology is evolving at an incredible pace, and customers need clear and reliable measurements to understand the expected performance and value of their systems,” said Nigel Dessau, senior vice president and Chief Marketing Officer at AMD. “AMD does not believe SM2012 achieves this objective. Hence AMD cannot endorse or support SM2012 or remain part of the BAPCo consortium.”

AMD will only endorse benchmarks based on real-world computing models and software applications, and which provide useful and relevant information. AMD believes benchmarks should be constructed to provide unbiased results and be transparent to customers making decisions based on those results. Currently, AMD is evaluating other benchmarking alternatives, including encouraging the creation of an industry consortium to establish an open benchmark to measure overall system performance.

AMD encourages anyone wanting more details about the construction and scoring methodology of the SM2012 benchmark to contact BAPCo. For more details on AMD’s decision to exit BAPCo, please read AMD’s Executive Blog authored by Nigel Dessau.

BAPCo® Reaffirms Open Development Process For SYSmark® 2012

SAN MATEO, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCo®) is a non-profit consortium made up of many of the leaders in the high tech field, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Sony, Toshiba and ARCintuition. For nearly 20 years BAPCo has provided real world application based benchmarks which are used by organizations worldwide. SYSmark® 2012 is the latest release of the premiere application based performance benchmark. Applications used in SYSmark 2012 were selected based on market research and include Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Acrobat, WinZip, Autodesk AutoCAD and 3ds Max, and others.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was, until recently, a long standing member of BAPCo. We welcomed AMD’s full participation in the two year development cycle of SYSmark 2012, AMD’s leadership role in creating the development process that BAPCo uses today and in providing expert resources for developing the workload contents. Each member in BAPCo gets one vote on any proposals made by member companies. AMD voted in support of over 80% of the SYSmark 2012 development milestones, and were supported by BAPCo in 100% of the SYSmark 2012 proposals they put forward to the consortium.

BAPCo also notes for the record that, contrary to the false assertion by AMD, BAPCo never threatened AMD with expulsion from the consortium, despite previous violations of its obligations to BAPCo under the consortium member agreement.

BAPCo is disappointed that a former member of the consortium has chosen once more to violate the confidentiality agreement they signed, in an attempt to dissuade customers from using SYSmark to assess the performance of their systems. BAPCo believes the performance measured in each of the six scenarios in SYSmark 2012, which is based on the research of its membership, fairly reflects the performance that users will see when fully utilizing the included applications.

VIA's Statement About Leaving The BAPCo Consortium

VIA today confirmed reports that we have tendered our resignation to BAPCo. We strongly believe that the benchmarking applications tests developed for SYSmark 2012 and EEcoMark 2.0 do not accurately reflect real world PC usage scenarios and workloads and therefore feel we can no longer remain as a member of the organization.

We hope that the industry can adopt a much more open and transparent process for developing fair and objective benchmarks that accurately measure real world PC performance and are committed to working with companies that share our vision.

CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has launched a mobile version of its Geforce GTX560 graphics chip for notebook gaming.

Not quite a dedicated gaming chip, the Geforce GTX560M is for laptop designers who want a wider feature set in a GPU, so it’s not cranked up to full power but it does have some decent additions.

The GTX560M has Nvidia’s Optimus power switching technology, a first for notebook makers wanting to save on power to extend battery life. With a 1550Mhz processor clock speed and 192 CUDA cores, the GTX560M also offers DX11 gaming at full HD 1080p resolution. The Green Goblin even goes so far as to claim that it will be powerful enough to run Duke Nukem Forever at 50FPS.

“The GeForce GTX560M and Nvidia Optimus mean gamers get 50 frames per second in Duke Nukem Forever and five hours of battery life in Microsoft Office,” said Nvidia laptops general manager Rene Haas.

The graphics chip will also support other standard Nvidia technology that you’d expect to see. That means support for Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology, Physx real time physics rendering and CUDA GPGPU computing applications support.

The release comes just two weeks after Nvidia announced the GTX560 desktop version of its GPU, which is based on the GF114 but with higher clock speeds and better thermal characteristics.

A few vendors including Alienware, Asus and MSI said they’d offer the GPU soon, but Toshiba didn’t waste any time hanging about. The Japanese giant announced today that its Qosmio X770 17.3in gaming laptop will have the 1.5GB version of Nvidia’s GTX560M mobile GPU. µ

GRAPHICS CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has launched a wired version of its shutter glasses used as part of its 3D Vision system.

Last week Nvidia announced a tie-up with Mozilla and Youtube that resulted the video sharing website supporting Nvidia’s 3D Vision system for its 3D videos, and now the firm has announced an updated, lower cost version of the shutter glasses that are needed to use 3D Vision.

Although Nvidia’s wired 3D shutter glasses might look similar to the wireless ones it has been flogging for the past 18 months, the firm says this revised design has more flex, resulting in a better ergonomic fit. The wired glasses are intended for users who view 3D content in a traditional PC environment for gaming rather than lounging around in front of a big telly watching movies, though they can be used for that so long as the sofa is not too far away.

Nvidia stated a price tag of (£60), though it didn’t quote UK pricing and availability at launch.

It’s a smart move by Nvidia to launch a lower cost version of its 3D Vision shutter glasses. However if it manages to get rid of them completely then it might be onto a real winner. µ

NVIDIA CHIEF Jen-Hsun Huang has told Reuters that he expects Android-based tablet devices to overtake the Apple Ipad in terms of popularity.

Huang, who is the CEO of chip designer Nvidia, said that improved versions of the Android operating system and an increase in the number of applications will help propel Google-based systems above the Apple alternative.

“The Android phone took only two and a half years to achieve the momentum that we’re talking about. I would expect the same thing on Honeycomb tablets,” said Huang to Reuters.

Huang also took time to discuss Superman’s son, or perhaps he was referring to Nvidia’s next-generation mobile processor when he mentioned Kal-El.

Kal-El, said Huang, has already been accepted into devices from major PC and phone firms, however he was vague about how many.

“It’s got to be at least 10. We have five major phone companies and we have five major PC [manufacturers],” he said. µ