Nvidia commits to simultaneous desktop-laptop driver releases

Nvidia wants to help out you laptop gamers. How nice of them. From now on, the company will release both desktop and mobile drivers at the same time. This isn’t such a big deal for desktop users, what with their fancy GTX 480s, but laptop users won’t have to wait for the Dells and HPs of the world to release updated drivers. Nvidia’s got you covered.

The Verde drivers, as they’re known, (verde being “green” in many Romance languages), will henceforth ship simultaneously across platforms. That means whenever Nvidia ships a new driver version for its big, beefy desktop cards, it will also ship driver updates for its mobile cards. This won’t just benefit gamers—and really, who “games” on a laptop?—since Nvidia GPUs are chuck full of CUDA goodness. There, your applications turn to the GPU for computational support, not just for drawing pretty pictures. Sorta like having an additional CPU in there.

This doesn’t mean that all drivers will be the same, of course, just that they’ll come out simultaneously.

As hinted, I seriously don’t understand the appeal of a gaming laptop. Surely they’re more expensive, and less powerful, pound for pound, than gaming desktops. Or am I horribly misinformed?

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