NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 And 1050 Ti Max-Q Laptop Graphics Are Incoming According To Driver Listing

NVIDIA appears to be gearing up to deliver some new GPU flavor to the mobile gaming market. The only thing we know about this new graphics engine right now comes from a Linux driver changelog that calls out added support for a "GeForce GTX1050 Ti with Max-Q Design." There are no tidbits about clock speeds or other performance details noted in the changelog.

The deal with Max-Q Design GPU in laptops is that they are essentially desktop-equivalent configurations but designed to be more power efficient and with better cooling design that allow longer sustained performance over time with quieter acoustic profiles in thinner lighter machines as well. The caveat is that you do give up a bit of top end clock speed in exchange for that thinner, lighter profile. The strategy here with this release, however, is that the new video card is to aim directly at the AMD RX Vega GL GPU that's integrated in the recently released Intel 8th Gen chips. As for clock speeds on the new GPU, all we have for now are guesses based on what cards around the GTX 1050 Ti with Max-Q Design are running.

The GTX 1050 Ti (Non-Max Q) mobile GPU that would sit right above this new card runs at 1620 MHz on boost clock giving it a theoretical maximum FP32 performance of 2.49 TFLOPS. With the GTX 1050 Ti with Max-Q sitting directly beneath that it is expected to run at 1417 MHz with 2.18 TFLOPS. It's expected that a standard GTX 1050 Max-Q is coming as well. 

A new GPU is good news for mobile fans more interested in power consumption than raw performance. NVIDIA also recently announced that it would be abandoning driver future driver support all 32-bit operating systems with no new drivers coming after Release 390.