NVIDIA Optimus Offers Power and Performance Balance for Notebooks

As laptop users, we always come into situation where we have to choose either longer battery life or better performance. Hence, that is why certain laptops especially those that contains dedicated graphic processor unit (GPU), comes with a function that enabled users to switch their GPU from dedicated to integrated GPU (IGP) and vice versa.

Depending on manufacture’s implementation, it either works through BIOS, software tweaking or a toggle button. In short, users have to manually switch the GPU themselves. Now, a new technology from NVIDIA (http://www.nvidia.com) called Optimus is going to make manual GPU switching a thing of the past.

What Optimus does is it automates the GPU switching process. So, whenever a user runs a non-graphical demanding application such as Microsoft Word, the power friendly IGP will be used. On the other hand, the dedicated GPU will be used only when the user runs performance hungry applications such as games, Flash applications or movies.

With that, NVIDIA claims that users would able to obtain the best of both worlds - better battery life without compromising performance, all without the need of manual GPU tweaking.

Notebooks with NVIDIA Optimus technology are already on its way to market, so do take note of notebooks with the NVIDIA Optimus sticker if you are interested to check them out. For clearer view of the technology, take a look at NVIDIA Optimus short video presentation after the break or you can always head to its official page (http://bit.ly/bMx7FK) for even more information.