According to a Taiwanese maker of mostly gaming and high-performance laptops called Clevo, graphics chip maker Nvidia will roll out a new generation of notebook-use video cards in early 2014.
A leaked product roadmap shows the Nvidia GeForce 800M-series video cards will debut in Clevo laptops in February. Numerous notebook models ranging from mobile gaming rigs to thin-and-light systems are listed with the high-end GeForce GTX 880M, GTX 870M, GTX 860M, GTX 850M, and mid-range GT 840M dedicated graphics processors inside, but their specs and details are unknown to us at the time of this writing. An exception here are amounts of video memory on these cards, with the GeForce 800M claimed to incorporate whooping 8GB of it. For comparison, the present 700M generation comes with up to 4GB, which is already enough for all games.
Nvidia’s next generation of GPUs is expected to be based on the brand new “Maxwell” architecture with many improvements including “Unified Virtual Memory” as the most significant, but it’s not known if this technology will be incorporated into the GTX 880M / 870M / 860M / 850M, and GT 840M. Also, the upcoming Nvidia laptop and desktop video cards will be based on the new 20nm production technology, down from the current 28nm. By default, this die shrink will enable better performance-per-Watt ratio, leading to faster graphics speed, cooler GPU operation, and longer battery life on laptops with the GeForce 800M-series.
Another possibility is that some or all the listed video cards will be re-brands of the current “Kepler”-based GeForce 700M series with some minor improvements, but this is just a speculation.