GeForce Hybrid Notebooks Stretch Battery

Three new "hybrid" notebooks can switch off their GeForce graphics on the fly to stretch out battery life when needed.

Power and efficiency always come at the expense of one another. Add a powerful graphics accelerator to your notebook and it makes games fly, but gobbles down battery. Use integrated graphics and you can stretch your battery for hours but games crawl. Nvidia, however, now claims it can offer the best of both worlds with “hybrid” graphics accelerators for notebooks which can turn off when not needed to extend battery life using integrated graphics.

The company announced on Thursday that the Sony Vaio Z, Fujistu Siemens Amilo XI 3650 and BenQ Joybook S42 would be the first Nvidia-equipped notebooks to offer the functionality. Like V8 cars that can shut down cylinders to save on gas, the computers can switch off the Nvidia chipsets while running and turn on the integrated Intel graphics instead. Using this functionality, Sony even claims it has managed to wring five hours of battery life out the GeForce-9300M-equipped Sony Vaio Z.

“Now consumers can experience a new breed of laptops that eliminates the compromise between battery life and visual computing performance,” said Nvidia’s general manager of its notebook segment, Rene Haas, in a statement.

Although all of Nvidia’s GeForce 9-series notebook chips support the functionality, Sony, Fujitsu-Siemens and BenQ were the first notebook manufacturers to build in compatability for the feature.