NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go vs. ATI's M28: The Mobile GPU Wars Begin

Final Words

First and foremost, kudos to NVIDIA for launching a mobile GPU and be able to promise availability of notebooks based on the GPU on the same day. This year we have seen far too many GPU launches on the desktop side met with absolutely zero availability, and to have a launch with availability on the same day is a nice change of pace. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a new era for NVIDIA, we'll just have to wait and see. With ATI's M28 launch just two weeks away, we can only hope that ATI will follow suit in having launch and availability paired with one another in the same manner as NVIDIA. With the GeForce 6800 Go, NVIDIA has effectively set the launch schedule standard that ATI must at least follow in order to avoid the scorn of AnandTech and end-users alike.

Performance-wise, the latest mobile GPUs from both ATI and NVIDIA are quite strong. Offering desktop-class performance (because they are basically desktop GPUs with some neat power management features), ATI's M28 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go make perfect LAN-party notebooks as well as excellent desktop replacement notebooks for users who happen to be gamers. The performance of both solutions was pretty impressive, with 1280 x 1024 being an extremely playable resolution on either notebook. The performance advantage does to go ATI however, the M28 performed very well across the board, only losing to NVIDIA in Doom 3 performance but offering much higher performance in most other benchmarks.

Things could get very interesting with NVIDIA's higher performance configuration of the GeForce 6800 Go running at 450/600, instead of the 300/300 configuration we tested here today. At 450/600, the performance advantage could definitely shift to NVIDIA in the areas where things are already close and ATI's performance gap could also be eaten into. ATI may have an answer to NVIDIA's higher clocked configuration of the GeForce 6800 Go; while ATI only rates the M28 at 400/400, some manufacturers are apparently running it at higher speeds, we will have to wait and see what is launched by the end of this month, but the performance verdict is far from final. All we know today is that M28 is faster than NVIDIA's baseline GeForce 6800 Go configuration, and we'll have to wait until the end of this month for a truly final verdict on the king of the DTR mobile GPU market.

What's even more exciting however is the possibility of both ATI and NVIDIA's mid-range GPUs coming down to more manageable-sized notebooks in the near future. While we just had the 6600 vs X700 battle on the desktop, don't be too surprised if we see a very similar comparison on the mobile side next year.