Nvidia has its eyes set on taking advantage of graphic specific applications that are going to be appearing on Windows 7. The other “secret weapon” of Nvidia’s is its new Tegra chip. The company is hoping to see some growth with the combination of the new chip and the new operating system.

Another new technology called DirectX Compute is supposed to take advantage of modern day graphics chips and help them improve the speed and responsiveness of the new operating system.

So what is Tegra? Its a type of system that’s on a chip. It’s designed to help give better graphics to smaller devices such as cell phones. The system has been in development for around four years and has had 500 workers working on it. Needless to say the project isn’t a small one. In fact, the company has referred to the project as creating a computer the size of a penny.

The technology will most likely be put to use in Netbooks such as the Intel based Atom Netbook and the Apple MacBook. The smaller devices will need this technology to achieve better graphics and to compete with desktop computers. Hopefully the Tegra technology will spread throughout the integrated graphics cards used for laptops as well and boost the video performance for laptops as many gamers and video demanding consumers have little to work with in the field of mobile graphics. The little bit that consumers do have to work with usually cost twice as much as a laptop with integrated graphics.

However it may be a while before we see the technology in laptops as the company was referring to the Ion platform when they were mentioning the Tegra technology. The Ion platform deals with the Netbooks rather than laptops. All we can do is hope that new technology will improve mobile PC’s graphics in the near future.

Source: CNET