Closing Thoughts

For a first look at the performance and technology in the GeForce GTX 980M mobile GPU, I think we have provided quite a bit of information that is both useful and interesting.

Clearly, the new GTX 980M is the fastest mobile GPU we have ever put to the test and it is able to do that because of the energy efficiency of the Maxwell architecture. Even if another product family could match or beat the performance of the GTX 980M, whether that be from NVIDIA's previous designs or from AMD, when you are limited by power consumption and thermal dissipation as you are with a mobile design, raw power means less.

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Remember that the GTX 980 desktop part is able to match or beat the performance of the Radeon R9 290X while using ~130 watts less power and the GTX 970 was outperforming the R9 290 and using ~85 watts less. When you move those same designs down to the mobile form factor where you are limited to 150 watts when plugged in and 50 watts when on battery for the GPU, being able to maximize the performance per watt aspect of a part is more important than performance per dollar.

I am still eager to get my hands on a couple of the most recent AMD Radeon mobility designs (maybe even the new iMac with the R9 M295X) to see if this holds up, but I am going to guess that NVIDIA will maintain a performance advantage in discrete notebook GPUs for at least the rest of this generation.

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But even as power efficient as the new GTX 980M is, the realization that running on battery cuts back on available power so dramatically was interesting to really test. Our 1080p gaming performance dropped by 75-85% (looking at average frame rates) when simply unplugging the MSI GT72 notebook and attempting to play the games at the same quality settings as when the notebook was plugged in. The result was a sub-par gaming experience for sure, but NVIDIA knew that and tried to rebuild GeForce Experience and Battery Boost to help address that concern.

By enabling a mobile-specific "on battery" quality preset within the GFE software, NVIDIA attempts to compensate for that performance delta by adjusting quality settings to a point where you will hit the 30 FPS mark and maintain it. That provides a smooth gaming experience, which the company is equally (if not more) concerned about than anything else. In my testing with Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, GRID 2, Shadow of Mordor and a few other games that was definitely the case and the gaming experience on battery when utilizing the GeForce Experience presets was damned good. Even if you don't want to use presets in the way GFE sets them, knowing what NVIDIA recommends for a good result is a great starting point for experienced PC gamers.

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In this article I didn't touch on the battery life differences of Battery Boost, but expect more from Steve on that in a future review of the MSI GT72 notebook.

The GTX 980M is an impressive part and NVIDIA has done a lot of work to make sure that the gaming experience for mobile users is as good as it can be. Now, who will be the first to send me a GTX 980 SLI configuration in a notebook?

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