NVIDIA used its CES platform to offer some information on the company's upcoming products, but the announcements made fell short of generating any sort of "wow" factor. That's not necessarily a bad thing—small, incremental, but ultimately unexciting product improvements are just as important as next-generation bolts of lightning—but anyone hoping for news of an ATI killer or dominant new chipset ended up disappointed.
NVIDIA spent a good deal of time talking up what the company is calling Hybrid SLI. The term refers to a set of two technologies, GeForce Boost and Hybrid Power, both of which must be present in order to earn the Hybrid SLI moniker. GeForce Boost is a performance-enhancing option that melds an integrated GPU with a discrete GPU. Once combined in this manner, the two GPUs render different frames, with the results being passed to the integrated GPU for display.
The real-world performance gain from using GeForce Boost is unknown. NVIDIA claims a 40 percent improvement in 3DMark 2006 when GeForce Boost is enabled, but gives no information on which integrated and discrete solutions were combined to achieve that number. It's hard to tell how the system's increased 3DMark score correlates to other games, but NVIDIA was kind enough to include the additional bar graph quantitatively demonstrating the performance benefits of GeForce Boost (and no, we didn't crop out any percentages).
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