NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 SLI (Laptop) vs Intel Arc A770M vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 SLI (Laptop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 SLI for laptops is a combination of two GTX 1080 graphics cards in SLI mode. Each card renders one frame at a time (AFR mode) but depends for most games on a good profile in the driver. Therefore, the performance can range from no gains over a single GTX 1080 to up to 90% faster performance. Sometimes, the combination may also suffer from micro-stuttering. The technical details of the card are identical to a single GTX 1080 (see for more information) and the power consumption is doubled. Therefore, the 1080 SLI combination is only found in huge clunky laptops.

Intel Arc A770M

The Intel Arc A770M (Device ID 5690) is a dedicated mid-range graphics card from Intel for notebooks. It is based on the ACM-G10 chip and offers all 32 Xe cores (512 ALUs), 32 ray tracing units, 6 MB L1 cache and 16 MB L2 cache. The clock rates can range from 300 MHz to 1650 MHz (gaming) to 2050 MHz (turbo). The memory interface is 256 bits wide and supports 16 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with 16 Gbps. The TGP is between 120 and 150 watts depending on the model.

The performance of the A770M is on average of all games we tested approx. 4% ahead of a mobile RTX 3060 laptop GPU. However, there are significant deviations depending on the game. In Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, for example, the A770M can reach the level of an RTX 3070 laptop GPU and demonstrate its theoretical performance.

The ACM-G10 chip is manufactured at TSMC in 6 nm (N6 process), uses a BGA2660 interface (resolved), offers 21.7 billion transistors and is 406 mm² in size. It integrates two media engines for VP9, AVC, HEVC, AV1 8k60 12-bit HDR decoding and 8k 10-bit HDR encoding. The integrated 4 display pipes support 4x 4k120 HDR, HDMI 2.0B, DP 2.0 10G and Adaptive Sync.

Dynamic Power Share can be used with a 12th generation CPU (Alder Lake) via Deep Link.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile

The mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 is a graphics card for high end laptops. It is based on the Pascal architecture and manufactured in 16 nm FinFET at TSMC. The GPU is using the smaller GP106 chip. Compared to the desktop version of the GTX 1060, the laptop version offers the same amount of shaders but slightly lower clock rates. The TDP is slightly less than the old GTX 970M (predecessor).

For thin and light laptops Nvidia offer a Max-Q called version of the GTX 1060 with lower TDP and also significantly lower performance. Sadly this variant im sold with the same GTX 1060 name, making it hard to judge the performance.

The performance of the mobile GTX 1060 is a few percent below a reference GTX 1060 desktop card. In our benchmark so far (no max-Q version) the mobile GTX 1060 was somewhere between -1 and -16% slower than a desktop variant. A comprehensive review of the dekstop GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition with 6 GB GDDR5 can be found here. Therefore, the card is most suited for Full HD or WQHD gaming in high to maximum details (see benchmarks below).

The GP106 chip is produced in 16nm FinFET at TSMC and offers a range of new features, like DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). A list of improvements and features can be found in our article on the Pascal architecture.

The power consumption is specified with a TGP of 80 Watt and therefore slightly below the old GTX 970M. Since summer 2017 a low power variant (Max-Q) is available for thin and light laptops with reduced performance and a lower TGP of 60 - 70 Watt.