Gaming laptops are shining in more glory than they ever have been. With attractive displays, graphics cards, and the latest gaming technology, these devices attract many gamers’ eyes. However, even the most expensive and newest laptops face some issues regarding battery life that can impact a gamer’s performance. To tackle this issue, Nvidia has introduced Advanced Optimus, a unique system that conserves batteries to help gaming laptop nvidia last longer.
What is Advanced Optimus?
It’s a technology developed specifically for gaming laptops using Nvidia laptop GPUs. The RTX graphics cards use ray tracing and high resolutions in a thin form factor. Advanced Optimus is directed towards maintaining distributed workload to ensure power efficiency. It allows the laptops to swap between discrete graphics and built-in integrated graphics depending on the load to save the amount of power that the machine will use. It helps improve gaming performance by offering a smooth and tear-free gaming experience.
How Does Advanced Optimus Work?
Advances Optimum comes with a lot of moving parts for panels, chips etc. To understand how it works, let’s dive into the basics. Your gaming laptops have two GPUs: Integrated graphics or iGPU for low-powered tasks like MS Excel spreadsheet editing and discrete graphics (dGPU) for heavy workloads (to push high frame rates in specific games). If you utilize dGPU for simple tasks, it will overkill them and running dGPU will drain your laptop battery.
If you look at old gaming laptops, you may have to switch manually between iGPUs and dGPUs. In short, you have to reboot the system to apply changes which aren’t possible when playing a game. Also, you may have to change BIOS settings to make that switch. To remove this limitation, NVIDIA introduced Optimus or MS Hybrid. It automatically detects if the computer is dealing with any intensive workload or not and switches to the appropriate GPU for that particular workload. It’s a great optimization technique offering users an extended battery life and extra performance without interruption.
How Does Advanced Optimus Maintain Low Latency and High Frame Rates When Switching Between iGPU and dGPU?
It does so by using a hardware switch called MUX which is connected to the display and installed on the motherboard. Combining this switch with Nvidia’s programming codes offers a system that can automatically detect the workload intensity and automatically switches with GPU connected to the display.
How Does Advanced Optimus Enhance A RTX Gaming Laptop by Nvidia?
Here are a few benefits cum features of Nvidia Advanced Optimus when compared with non-Optimus laptops.
Performance in Gameplay: High frame rates hold the utmost importance in gaming. Considering this aspect, Nvidia Advanced Optimus delivers 11-27% & higher frame rates for a wide range of modern gaming titles.
Enduring Battery Life: By enabling an intelligent switch between RXT GPU and integrated graphics, Advanced Optimus delivers battery life optimized to give you optimal performance according to your needs. And the best battery life when not gaming. All of this is done seamlessly without requiring a laptop reboot.
Reduced System Latency: Having low latency enhances the games’ responsiveness. Nvidia is a leader in offering impressive gaming responsiveness with a keen consideration at a high frame rate. While it has introduced NVIDIA Reflex to measure and reduce system latency in games, with NVIDIA Advanced Optimus, the company has tried to remove the blockage between the GPU and the display, which reduced the latency by up to 20% in popular gaming titles.
G-Sync Displays: Earlier PC gamers used to deal with a lot of display-related issues. In those times, they had only two options, either deal with tearing displays or utilize V-Sync to enhance the display quality, but that would create high system latency and make devices sluggish. When the G-SYNC variable refresh rate was introduced, it solved all the worries faced by the users by delivering high-quality displays with almost no scope of latency.
By combining these displays with NVIDIA Advanced Optimus and its power to bypass the integrated graphics, gaming laptops are now integrated with G-SYNC variable refresh rate displays, thus eliminating tearing and high system latency.
Conclusion:
NVIDIA Advanced Optimus has impressively played its move in improving gaming performance by introducing a hardware-based dynamic display switch that efficiently bypasses the integrated graphics and reserving it for the display. It helps increase game performance, reduce system latency, and allow the use of G-SYNC variable refresh rate displays, thereby improving gamers’ experiences. NVIDIA Advanced Optimus is available on various gaming laptops. Some of the standout models are Lenovo Legion 5 Pro and Legion 7.