Nvidia Corp. has announced the GeForce Go FX 5700, a significant step up in performance from the company's earlier mobile graphics chip, the Go FX 5600. Nvidia's latest chip contains three vertex pipelines to the 5600's one, a boost that will translate into significantly higher graphics performance, according to Nvidia executives. By tweaking some of the chips' attributes, allowing the chip to run at a lower voltage, Nvidia maintained the same power budget as the Go FX 5600. Read more... The new chip also includes two new technologies: UltraShadow, for improving the performance of shadows in 3D games, and PowerMiser 4.0, part of the reason Nvidia was able to fit the Go FX 5700 in the 5600's power budget. "With DirectX 9 software, compatibity is more important than ever before," said Rob Csongor, senior director and geneal manager for Nvidia's mobile business. "At the same time, you can't add 3D power without adding some power management technology." Nvidia's new chips are designed to help them regain market share in the mobile market, currently dominated by rival ATI Technologies Inc. In third-quarter market share information published by Mercury Research, the firm found that ATI controlled approximately 71 percent of the market. The new GeForce Go 5700 runs at a core voltage of 350-MHz, while the memory interface is clocked at 300-MHz, Csongor said. The chip's operating voltage is 1.1 volts, versus 1.18 volts for the older Go 5600. "A customer can literally take out the old chip and put in the new one," Csongor said. The UltraShadow technology allows programmers to limit the effects of a shadow within a given area, freeing up the chip's processing resources for other tasks. Like a technology called Z-culling, the UltraShadow technology also culls or eliminates shadowed pixels that are not visible to the user. The PowerMiser technology, meanwhile, improves the battery life of notebooks using the chip. Because the most power-hungry part of the notebook is the display's backlight, the chip's SmartDimmer technology can intelligently control the brightness of the screen, Csongor said. The chip is sampling now, and should appear in notebooks beginning in the first quarter, Csongor said. Nvidia Press Release