Introduction

Once upon a time, the portable PCs were seen as a very expensive tool for business users, and usually offered less performance than a normal desktop PC. Currently, that’s not the situation anymore. A notebook is now a very affordable PC, and the newest technologies make it reliable for many different usage scenarios.

The main issues found on notebooks nowadays, however, lies in the graphic area. Some notebooks now feature a dedicated GPU, with different performance levels, but always taking the energy consumption into consideration, in order not to have a big impact on the battery. Basically, every laptop has a GPU, which are described as being integrated or discrete. The integrated GPUs are those who come within a chip integrated in the chipset, or with the new Intel processors, on the processor package. A discrete GPU is, instead, its own chipset, nVIDIA or ATI usually, that is added to the motherboard and usually with a dedicated memory set.

The whole scenario is very varied: for those who want a biggest autonomy for the battery, an integrated GPU would be the best option. For those who need 3D performances, the discrete GPU would be the choice. But there are also the hybrid systems, that allow users to choose, according to their particular needs, whether to use the discrete or integrated graphic system, or even both at the same time. That’s what we’ll be covering in this article. We’ll also speak about nVIDIA’s new technology, Optimus.