What is Nvidia Advanced Optimus?
If youve been looking to buy a Nvidia-powered gaming laptop, you may have heard of the term Nvidia Advanced Optimus. Weve compiled this guide about Nvidia Advanced Optimus to break down the technology into laymans terms and help you out with your purchasing decision. Heres everything you need to know. Nvidia Advanced Optimus is Nvidias graphics switching technology, which allows a laptop display to dynamically switch between the integrated graphics (inside the processor) and the discrete graphics (the Nvidia GPU). This boosts the battery life of the laptop when your laptop is dealing with basic tasks, as it doesnt need to leverage the resources of the power-hungry Nvidia GeForce GPU. Nvidia Advanced Optimus also boosts the laptops performance by allowing the display to connect directly to the discrete GPU as soon as you give your laptop a heavy workload (such as gaming or video editing). This ensures theres no latency, which would traditionally occur since the discrete GPU would have to copy the rendered 3D content back to the integrated GPU in order for it to be displayed on screen. Having the discrete GPU directly connected to the display allows laptops to support G-Sync, which helps to sync the display to the GPU in order to prevent screen tearing. You can play with the settings for the Nvidia Advanced Optimus feature if you wish, picking between three modes: Automatic Select (default) will detect your workloads and switch to the most appropriate GPU, Optimus will switch to the integrated GPU and Nvidia GPU Only will switch to the discrete GPU. Of course, youll need a laptop with a Nvidia GPU in order for this to work. Its also worth checking whether the laptop youre eying up actually supports Nvidia Advanced Optimus, as it isnt a guarantee. Check out our best gaming laptop list to find the best option. If youre on the fence about what graphics card to go for, you can also check out our best GPU guide.