What is Nvidia Advanced Optimus and how can it save your laptop's battery?
(Pocket-lint) — Gaming laptops are in the best place they've ever been in, with attractive designs and new gaming tech making it easier than ever to pick up a super-powered laptop that nonetheless keeps a low profile and slim build.
Even with an expensive new laptop, though, some problems can crop up, and a big one for gamers is the sense that their gaming laptop doesn't have the same battery life that a lower-powered machine might offer. That's part of why Nvidia came up with Advanced Optimus — a genius system to help your laptop last longer.
Advanced Optimus is a technology that Nvidia has developed specifically for gaming laptops that use its RTX laptop GPUs, graphics cards that are capable of ray-tracing and high resolutions even in a thin laptop.
It allows these laptops to swap which GPU is driving the laptop’s onboard display on the fly between their discrete GPUs and their lower-spec onboard integrated graphics, to save on the amount of power that the machine has to use, improve performance in games and deliver the smooth, tear-free certified G-SYNC gaming experience. No reboot required.
It's a simple concept, but one that makes a massive difference. After all, it's great to have a gaming GPU that can manage ray-traced reflections when you're playing a new game and want it to look as good as possible, but if you're just checking Twitter then you just need the lower-spec’d integrated GPU (iGPU).
This means that for low-powered tasks the laptop can opt for its low-powered iGPU, and can automatically swap to the discrete GPU when you actually need it — Nvidia RTX GPU power, performance and features when you need it, power savings when you don’t. This means Advanced Optimus can hugely increase battery life when
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