A whole stable's worth of horsepower goes into making VR the immersive experience it is, and with the GTX 1080, Nvidia rolled up its sleeves and gave us the entire farm. Two cheaper, less meaty options followed, the GTX 1070 and 1060, and now the company has managed to squeeze its VR-ready GPU line into notebooks.
In our experience with the 1080 flagship, we felt it pull us ever deeper into the virtual world, assuming money's no object. If it is, we found the slightly cheaper, slightly less meaty GTX 1070 to be the sweet spot between price and performance, while the 1060 rounds out the series with a decent VR offering on a budget.
The notebook versions of each are aimed at offering a similar experience on the go. The portable 1080 is only slightly pared back from the desktop version, with base clock speeds of 1,556 MHz, down from 1,607 MHz. With a memory speed of 10 Gbps, it has the same 8 GB RAM, although upgraded to GDDR5X over the vanilla GDDR5.
The notebook 1070 keeps the 8 GB GDDR5 RAM and 8 Gbps memory speed, but ups the Cuda cores to 2,048, from its desktop counterpart's 1,920. The trade-off is that they run at a clock speed of 1,442 MHz, down from 1,506 MHz, but the difference should be fairly unnoticeable.
It's a similar story for the budget option, the 1060. While the number of cores stays steady on 1,280, the base clock speed drops to 1,404 MHz from its previous 1,506 MHz. It maintains its memory with up to 6 GB GDDR5 RAM and a speed of 8 Gbps.
Altogether, the notebook GTX 10 series is designed to be as VR-ready as the desktop line. Several big-name OEMs have announced notebooks with the chips inside – including Asus' Republic of Gamers, MSI, Razer, Acer, Aorus, Clevo, EVGA, Gigabyte, HP and Lenovo – offering VR-ready notebooks for as little as US$1,299.
Check out the dramatic reveal video below.