Nvidia Unveils World's Fastest Laptop Graphics Chip

Today Nvidia has formally announced the 'GTX 480M GPU' for laptops and it achieves a number of significant milestones for the company. Firstly it brings true DirectX 11 support with tessellation, secondly it sees Fermi architecture's debut on laptops and thirdly it is quite simply the fastest mobile GPU to date.

Raw stats? How about 352 CUDA cores, a 425MHz GPU clock, an 850MHz processor clock, a texture fill rate of 18.7bn triangles per second and 256bit memory running at 1200MHz generating 76.8GB/sec of bandwidth! Yes it's monstrous and there's full PhysX and OpenCL support in there too while 1080p video playback can be done in its sleep and you'll even be ripping Blu-rays (royalty free ones, of course) in no time.

Nvidia has shipped the GTX 480M GPU to partners already and gaming specialist Clevo will be the first company to market with laptops based on the new graphics chip. Numerous other manufacturers will soon follow.

Given the inability to substantially upgrade a gaming laptop I've never been their greatest fan, but if money is no object and you want the best of the best you won't be able to beat a GTX 480M equipped laptop... at least for the next few month