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NVIDIA gives a cool demo of Optimus

by: John -
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Anything to get more battery life out of notebooks and netbooks I am all for. I currently own an ASUS 1201N with a NVIDIA ION giving me good battery life and good performance. I wish it was a little more in the battery life though as 4.5 hours for the netbook but the size of it is awesome.

In any case, NVIDIA's bringing forth a technology called Optimus that will turn on or off the graphics processor depending on if it is in use. Doing so can, in theory, save you some power and allow you to go longer on battery power. Check out the video below of it in action. One of the cooler parts is when they pull out the GPU while the system is running to show that it is indeed being shut off. After that, they plug it back in and run the an app to turn on the GPU again. Pretty slick to see.