Laptop Graphics Guide 2009

And so it begins ... after the long hiatus, the Notebook Review Mobile GPU Guide's 2009 Edition is rushed out of the gates before Nvidia can make matters more complicated with more GPUs. I have to be honest, part of the reason you didn't see this article sooner is because, simply put, Nvidia created “brand spaghetti” in the marketplace. Despite their mobile parts only being based on a couple different chips, they have a full twenty-five (25!) parts in circulation right now, and that's not including the recently announced G200 line which I'll talk about in brief towards the end. ATI's not doing too much better at twenty variants circulating, but their parts are far easier to keep track of and much easier to describe.

Because of the radical changes to the graphics market since my last guide, I have to revamp my approach to notebook Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Pipelines and all that garbage are past tense now, with almost all mobile parts now using the unified shaders that DirectX 10 mandated in Windows Vista. And because of the product flood in the notebook market, I'm going to take a different approach and instead organize mobile graphics cards by the chips that power them. Especially when you hang out in the Nvidia sections you'll see exactly how practical this approach is.

Finally, before you get into this guide you may want to have a look at my “How it Works” entry on mobile graphics.

NO YOU CAN'T UPGRADE YOUR NOTEBOOK GRAPHICS

You cannot. Stop posting in the forums. Stop asking about this. You just can't. Moving on.