Every so often, NVIDIA releases a new architecture for their GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) which has notable improvements across the board for both Desktop and Mobile graphic solutions. However in recent architectural releases, the desktop counterpart has only really gained a small increase in performance, which the majority of improvements focused on heat and power consumption.
However, this pales in comparison to the improvements seen in NVIDIA's mobile solutions, as not only has the heat outputted from the cards been drastically reduced, the performance gain coming from NVIDIA's previous flagship mobile GPU (GTX 880M) has gone up by 50% with the GTX 980M. This brings the performance difference between mobile and desktop solutions ever closer as we move towards a more mobile world. The fact that the heat output has also been reduced by up to 10C (trust me, this is a lot!), allows for a cooler, less stressful experience for the card. And for the enthusiasts, this gives more headroom for overclocking the GTX 9xxM series
For once, NVIDIA can truly say that their mobile solutions can run all the latest games at full details, the power inside this small card is incredibly impressive compared to the fair larger desktop variants.
Kepler architecture has also brought in 8GB VRAM variants to their GTX 980M. A lot of people think that this is too much, but in my opinion this is greatly needed. Now that the new consoles have been released, this means new games with impressive graphics and as such PC ports will be released. The result of porting a game designed for the consoles, over to the PC platform usually results in a huge increase of system resource usage. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is a great example, in the single-player it will use up to 11GB of system RAM, and a full 7.9GB of VRAM from your graphics card. In comments from users, the amount of RAM and VRAM available does not seem to really affect the performance of the game, but using a lot of VRAM certainly helps with texture load times and texture pop-in. The amount of system RAM used also greatly helps load times (even in multi-player) once the game gets going.
The release of the new Kepler architecture has coincided perfectly with the release of new games and new technologies
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