ATi has introduced a GPU that it is claiming will offer the thin and light laptop market the performance boost it has been waiting for. The ATi Mobility Radeon X700 offers eight parallel pixel pipes and six vertex shaders, as opposed to 12 in its high-end X800 GPU, and comes in the PCI-Express format, which is a AGP 8X solution. Based around .11-micron technology, the smaller die-size allows for improved power consumption without a sacrifice on performance. With an expected performance that is twice as fast as comparable ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 adapters, the X700 comes in two flavours - 64MB and 128MB of on-board DDRIII memory and comes with a core clock speed of 350MHz.
Fully DirextX 9 and OpenGlL compliant, the adapter can run the latest 3D games with ease. Further enhancements include ATI’s LCD Enhancement Engine (LCD-EE), which supports high resolution and widescreen laptops displays at resolutions up to WXGA (1920 x 1200 pixels) and QXGA (2048 x 1536 pixels).
Not to be out beat, rival GPU manufacturer nVidia has also announced details of its mainstream GPU for the thin and light laptop market. The nVidia GeForce Go 6200 series comes with four pixel pipes and three vertex shaders. Therefore is pitched at the ATi X300 and X600 rather than as a direct competitor of the more powerful Mobility Radeon X700. With a core speed of 300MHz and a PCI-Express connection, the latest adapter comes in the same .11-micron die-size as the ATi processor. The GeForce Go 6200 GPU comes with TurboCache technology, which offers performance without the need for more power. The first mobile chipset to use TurboCache, the process allows the GeForce Go 6200 to use a combination of local RAM and system memory for rendering. In us, nVidi suggests that the local frame buffer will act as a high-speed cache, while main memory is allocated dynamically as needed for graphics use. To see how this adapter handles see the exclusive review of the Sony VAIO VGN-FS1XP on page XX.
