Going portable without sacrificing performance or latency!
As of the writing of this post, it is possible to get a Sager NP9377 laptop from powernotebooks.com with a single GTX 880M, without Optimus, and with a 120Hz display for $1861. This is less than the price of a new 15 inch MacBookPro, and has roughly 10x the performance per pixel.
GTX 880M Specs (Kepler chip): 2930 Gflop/s, 160 Gb/s, 122 Gtex/s, 30 Gpix/s, 8 GB VRAM
The Perfect Portable Oculus Box
Nearly 3 Tflop/s. A display which can run at a user-defined frame rate up to 120Hz. The highest end portable NVIDIA GPU. This is a Kepler SLI based laptop, so no latency adding Optimus, and with a battery designed to run two GTX 880Ms, but a laptop shipped with only one GPU in the config I like (SLI is useless for VR). Laptop includes a HDMI 1.4a connector good for 1920x1080 at 120Hz (well beyond what DK2 needs).
Kepler vs Maxwell at 28nm
IMO NVIDIA really needs to stop selling multiple chipsets using the same name. A 860M is both Kepler and Maxwell, and to make matters worse, the newer Maxwell one has a lot less peak Gflop/s given the paper spec, and apparently only the Kepler one has 4GB of RAM. This is down right infuriating for any consumer who actually cares what is in their laptop. Vendors like xoticpc.com are completely confused and advertising the same 3D Vantage scores for both the Maxwell and Kepler version. Second, advertised TDP is completely useless (860M Maxwell is 40-45W TDP?, and 860M Kepler is 75W TDP?). For example, notebookcheck.net compared both 860Ms, and the difference is that they both use relatively the same power when fully loaded in a similar machine (obviously, given that notebooks are either power or thermal limited, and games run flat out). The performance difference on average is roughly only 10%. Actually 10% is a great gain for the Maxwell version given that they are on the same process, have the same memory bandwidth, and the Kepler version has much greater paper specs. However looks like for any substantial perf gains, we need to wait for the next process shrink.
Resolution Fail
3K Gaming Laptop? That 3K resolution insures this notebook is 2.25x slower than a standard 1920x1080 laptop with the same GPU. This is a gaming laptop for those who's gaming activities involve reading 2D text or playing turn based games...
Off Topic: Scanlines and Vintage TVs
Seems as if this current indie generation does not understand vintage pixel art. A pixel is not a square!
Pixel art as defined by vintage consoles should have alternating lit and black scanlines. Up until the 30Hz dark ages, consoles ran at 60Hz on 30Hz interlaced TVs by never sending the other half of interlaced scanlines and instead tricking the TV to restart the frame from scratch. This cut max vertical resolution in half (roughly 240 lines visible) but doubled frame rate.
I'm still looking for what I need to drive a vintage TV from my modern PC. The scanlines.hazard-city.de site is a great reference. Looks like the best path is (GPU) {HDMI to DVI-I}, {DVI-I to VGA}, {Genius II Scaler Box}, {CGA to Component} (TV). The application needs to render a 720x240 frame at 59.94 Hz but manualy double scan to a VGA safe 720x480. Then the Genius II box tosses out every other line and generates a CGA friendly 15khz signal. I have yet to find a good CGA to component TV converter (everything I've found is CGA to S-Video).
Option 2 is to try the EDID Dongle which was required to trick the older NVIDIA drivers to output VGA unsafe 15khz signals. Not sure if the newer cards can still even output that signal. This path results in skipping the need for the Genius II and for doing the manual double scan.
As of the writing of this post, it is possible to get a Sager NP9377 laptop from powernotebooks.com with a single GTX 880M, without Optimus, and with a 120Hz display for $1861. This is less than the price of a new 15 inch MacBookPro, and has roughly 10x the performance per pixel.
GTX 880M Specs (Kepler chip): 2930 Gflop/s, 160 Gb/s, 122 Gtex/s, 30 Gpix/s, 8 GB VRAM
The Perfect Portable Oculus Box
Nearly 3 Tflop/s. A display which can run at a user-defined frame rate up to 120Hz. The highest end portable NVIDIA GPU. This is a Kepler SLI based laptop, so no latency adding Optimus, and with a battery designed to run two GTX 880Ms, but a laptop shipped with only one GPU in the config I like (SLI is useless for VR). Laptop includes a HDMI 1.4a connector good for 1920x1080 at 120Hz (well beyond what DK2 needs).
Kepler vs Maxwell at 28nm
IMO NVIDIA really needs to stop selling multiple chipsets using the same name. A 860M is both Kepler and Maxwell, and to make matters worse, the newer Maxwell one has a lot less peak Gflop/s given the paper spec, and apparently only the Kepler one has 4GB of RAM. This is down right infuriating for any consumer who actually cares what is in their laptop. Vendors like xoticpc.com are completely confused and advertising the same 3D Vantage scores for both the Maxwell and Kepler version. Second, advertised TDP is completely useless (860M Maxwell is 40-45W TDP?, and 860M Kepler is 75W TDP?). For example, notebookcheck.net compared both 860Ms, and the difference is that they both use relatively the same power when fully loaded in a similar machine (obviously, given that notebooks are either power or thermal limited, and games run flat out). The performance difference on average is roughly only 10%. Actually 10% is a great gain for the Maxwell version given that they are on the same process, have the same memory bandwidth, and the Kepler version has much greater paper specs. However looks like for any substantial perf gains, we need to wait for the next process shrink.
Resolution Fail
3K Gaming Laptop? That 3K resolution insures this notebook is 2.25x slower than a standard 1920x1080 laptop with the same GPU. This is a gaming laptop for those who's gaming activities involve reading 2D text or playing turn based games...
Off Topic: Scanlines and Vintage TVs
Seems as if this current indie generation does not understand vintage pixel art. A pixel is not a square!
Pixel art as defined by vintage consoles should have alternating lit and black scanlines. Up until the 30Hz dark ages, consoles ran at 60Hz on 30Hz interlaced TVs by never sending the other half of interlaced scanlines and instead tricking the TV to restart the frame from scratch. This cut max vertical resolution in half (roughly 240 lines visible) but doubled frame rate.
I'm still looking for what I need to drive a vintage TV from my modern PC. The scanlines.hazard-city.de site is a great reference. Looks like the best path is (GPU) {HDMI to DVI-I}, {DVI-I to VGA}, {Genius II Scaler Box}, {CGA to Component} (TV). The application needs to render a 720x240 frame at 59.94 Hz but manualy double scan to a VGA safe 720x480. Then the Genius II box tosses out every other line and generates a CGA friendly 15khz signal. I have yet to find a good CGA to component TV converter (everything I've found is CGA to S-Video).
Option 2 is to try the EDID Dongle which was required to trick the older NVIDIA drivers to output VGA unsafe 15khz signals. Not sure if the newer cards can still even output that signal. This path results in skipping the need for the Genius II and for doing the manual double scan.