Nvidia announces GTX 970M and 980M Maxwell mobile GPUs

 Nvidia’s GM204 “Maxwell” architecture, the graphics technology inside the GTX 970 and GTX 980, is coming to laptops. If you follow graphics hardware closely, this might be confusing. Wait, you’d ask. Weren’t there already Maxwell 800M graphics chips, like the 860M in our favorite budget gaming laptop? Right you are! The thing is, that was an older generation of Maxwell (GM108), and Nvidia’s brushing that aside with the release of the second-gen architecture in its latest desktop--and now mobile--GPUs.

The GTX 980M and 970M are being pressed into gaming laptops at this very moment, and Nvidia claims that the mobile chips will be able to run games at ultra settings, even beyond 1080p resolution. More dramatically, Nvidia claims the GTX 980M will be 75% as powerful as the desktop GTX 980 (