Although the day two of IFA 2010 fair was the first time Nvidia allowed manufactures of notebooks to show their models with new Fermi-based discrete graphic solution, here on IFA you might have just played on notebook with Fermi without even knowing it. Is it Nvidia the one keeping this „under radar“, or the manufactures are not satisfied with the performance? We saw only several models with GT 425M and GT 420M: Acer, MSI and Samsung. These GPUs are implemented in their new series, and some of them support 3D Vision so you can play games in 3D environment. Behind the curtains, we saw the new Acer Aspire models with Core i7 and Core i5 CPUs and with GT 425M and GT 420M. The model with Core i5 and GT 420M has Nvidia Optimus and switchable graphic solution. We took an advantage of the opportunity and installed Alien Versus Predator D3D11 Benchmark, and ran it on the faster machine (Core i7 620M and GT 425M). The results are:
*DX11 Hardware Detected*
Using Default Video Settings:
Resolution: 1366 x 768
Texture Quality: 2
Shadow Quality: 3
Anisotropic Filtering: 16
SSAO: ON
Vertical Sync: OFF
DX11 Tessellation: ON
DX11 Advanced Shadows: ON
DX11 MSAA Samples: 1Benchmark Summary:
Number of frames: 820
Average Frame Time: 127.2ms
Average FPS: 7.9
One might say the 7.9 frames are not much, but you have to consider the fact this ran in 3D, and the graphic card is rendering twice as much frames. Also take a look at the Anisotropic Filtering settings and tessellation. Because of the limited time frame we couldn’t ran any more tests, but this should give you the impressions on the new mobile Fermi chip. During the test we haven’t noticed any particular noise and there was no smoke coming out of the cooling grills, so we guess Nvidia managed to shape up some issues a bit when it comes to mobile version. Of course, these are only the first impressions of the models showed here on IFA, and they can differ from the ones you can buy in store.
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The Samsung and MSI didn’t allow us to run benchmarks on them, but these models were displayed publicly so anyone could see them. Unfortunately, not even The Power Sledge was installed, so all we can do is believe what we saw in the device manager. But apart form the Acer model, we also saw the model names here, so we are talking about MSI GE603, Gaming series, and Samsung QX510 and QX410 their Premium series with Optimus technology.
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The interesting thing that came across our mind is that we walked trough these models and there was a lot of people around them, but no one really noticed that these are equipped with Nvidia Fermi graphics. Not even the guys at the boot were aware of that fact. It is hard for us to believe that no one even bother to make this models stand from the crowd a bit, because the graphic inside is really good, and it is something they should highlight.
