Over the last few weeks we have been bombarded with the launch of Intel's Z97 chipset and the release of the Haswell-Refresh processors, however whilst all of this has been going on, there has been another launch that has taken place, although it seems that it was completely missed out due to the rumours and speculations surrounding Z97. This launch that I?m referring to has come from the green team over at NVIDIA. On the desktop market we are well and truly settled with the latest range of 700 series GeForce GTX graphics cards, however the notebook side of the market has taken a step forward into the next generation with the release of the 800m series of discrete mobile graphics solutions. Now before I go any further, I will answer a very quick question that has been asked over the last few days; ?800 Series?? Does this mean that the desktop cards are soon going to be making a step forward as well??

Whilst I can understand where to question is coming from, after all it makes perfectly good sense to ask this, sadly the introduction of the 800m series is not a flag to indicate that the 800 series desktop GPUs are on their way. If anything I don't expect to hear anything about the GTX 800 series desktop cards until the end of this year or the start of next. This said though, the 800m series is still a generation up from the 700m as we would expect and along with it comes new levels of performance and more features and technology. Over the 700m series cards, the 800m chips are set to offer a performance boost of around 10% over the previous generation, along with new technologies such as battery boost, where the power drain from the GPU core is reduced, whilst keeping the frame rates over 30fps. The battery boost technology doesn't just give us a small gain in life either, NVIDIA say that in some cases we could expect to see notebook batteries lasting up to twice as long (compared to a similar system with a 700m series GPU) and alongside the more power conscious Haswell processors, mobile gaming is becoming more of a reality and not just a dream.